I gave up in despair.

The weeks passed and the grass grew.

When my wife nagged me to do something about it, I told her that either I would have to buy a new mower or let the grass grow.

Needless to say our house is now surrounded by a jungle.

Buried somewhere in deep grass there is a rusting lawn mower which I have promised to repair one day.

Lesson 47 Too high a price? 代价太高？

Pollution is the price we pay for an overpopulated, over industrialized planet.

When you come to think about it, there are only four ways you can deal with rubbish: dump it, burn it, turn it into something you can use again, attempt to produce less of it.

We keep trying all four methods, but the sheer volume of rubbish we produce worldwide threatens to overwhelm us.

Rubbish, however, is only part of the problem of polluting our planet.

The need to produce ever-increasing quantities of cheap food leads to a different kind of pollution.

Industrialized farming methods produce cheap meat products: beef, pork and chicken.

The use of pesticides and fertilizers produces cheap grain and vegetables.

The price we pay for cheap food may be already too high: Mad Cow Disease (BSE) in cattle, salmonella in chicken and eggs, and wisteria in dairy products.

And if you think you'll abandon meat and become a vegetarian, you have the choice of very expensive organically-grown vegetables or a steady diet of pesticides every time you think you' re eating fresh salads and vegetables, or just having an innocent glass of water!

However, there is an even more insidious kind of pollution that particularly affects urban areas and invades our daily lives, and that is noise.

Burglar alarms going off at any time of the day or night serve only to annoy passers-by and actually assist burglars to burgle.

Car alarms constantly scream at us in the street and are a source of profound irritation.

A recent survey of the effects of noise revealed (surprisingly?) that dogs barking incessantly in the night rated the highest form of noise pollution on a scale ranging from 1 to 7.

The survey revealed a large number of sources of noise that we really dislike.

Lawn mowers whining on a summer's day, late-night parties in apartment blocks, noisy neighbors, vehicles of all kinds, especially large container trucks thundering through quiet village, planes and helicopters flying overhead, large radios carried round in public places and played at maximum volume.

New technology has also made its own contribution to noise.

A lot of people object to mobile phones, especially when they are used in public places like restaurants or on public transport.

Loud conversations on mobile phones invade our thoughts or interrupt the pleasure of meeting friends for a quiet chat.

The noise pollution survey revealed a rather surprising and possibly amusing old-fashioned source of noise.

It turned out to be snoring!

Men were found to be the worst offenders.

It was revealed that 20% of men in their mid-thirties snore.

This figure rises to a staggering 60% of men in their sixties.

Against these figures, it was found that only 5% of women snore regularly, while the rest are constantly woken or kept awake by their trumpeting partners.

Whatever the source of noise, one thing is certain: silence, it seems, has become a golden memory.

Lesson 48 The silent village 沉默的村庄

In this much-travelled world, there are still thousands of places which are inaccessible to tourists.

We always assume that villagers in remote places are friendly and hospitable.

But people who are cut off not only from foreign tourists, but even from their own countrymen can be hostile to travellers.

Visits to really remote villages are seldom enjoyable ——as my wife and I discovered during a tour through the Balkans.

We had spent several days in a small town and visited a number of old churches in the vicinity.

These attracted many visitors, for they were not only of great architectural interest, but contained a large number of beautifully preserved frescoes as well.

On the day before our departure, several bus loads of tourists descended on the town.

This was more than we could bear, so we decided to spend our last day exploring the countryside.

Taking a path which led out of the town, we crossed a few fields until we came to a dense wood.

We expected the path to end abruptly, but we found that it traced its way through the trees.

We tramped through the wood for over two hours until we arrived at a deep stream.

We could see that the path continued on the other side, but we had no idea how we could get across the stream.

Suddenly my wife spotted a boat moored to the bank.

In it there was a boatman fast asleep.

We gently woke him up and asked him to ferry us to the other side.

Though he was reluctant to do so at first, we eventually persuaded him to take us.

The path led to a tiny village perched on the steep sides of a mountain.

The place consisted of a straggling unmade road which was lined on either side by small houses.

Even under a clear blue sky, the village looked forbidding, as all the houses were built of grey mud bricks.

The village seemed deserted, the only sign of life being an ugly-looking black goat on a short length of rope tied to a tree in a field nearby.

Sitting down on a dilapidated wooden fence near the field, we opened a couple of tins of sardines and had a picnic lunch.

All at once, I noticed that my wife seemed to be filled with alarm.

Looking up I saw that we were surrounded by children in rags who were looking at us silently as we ate.

We offered them food and spoke to them kindly, but they remained motionless.

I concluded that they were simply shy of strangers.

When we later walked down the main street of the villager, we were followed by a silent procession of children.

The village which had seemed deserted, immediately came to life.

Faces appeared at windows.

Men in shirt sleeves stood outside their houses and glared at us.

Old women in black shawls peered at us from doorways.

The most frightening thing of all was that not a sound could be heard.

There was no doubt that we were unwelcome visitors.

We needed no further warning.

Turning back down the main street, we quickened our pace and made our way rapidly towards the stream where we hoped the boatman was waiting.

Lesson 49 The ideal servant理想的仆人

It is a good thing my aunt Harriet died years ago.

If she were alive today she would not be able to air her views on her favourite topic of conversation: domestic servants.

Aunt Harriet lived in that leisurely age when servants were employed to do housework.

She had a huge, rambling country house called ‘The Gables'.

She was sentimentally attached to this house, for even though it was far too big for her needs, she persisted in living there long after her husband's death.

Before she grew old, Aunt Harriet used to entertain lavishly.

I often visited The Gables when I was boy.

No matter how many guests were present, the great house was always immaculate.

The parquet floors shone like mirrors; highly polished silver was displayed in gleaming glass cabinets; even my uncle's huge collection of books was kept miraculously free from dust.

Aunt Harriet presided over an invisible army of servants that continuously scrubbed, cleaned, and polished.

She always referred to them as ' the shifting population', for they came and went with such frequency that I never even got a chance to learn their names.

Though my aunt pursued what was, in those days, an enlightened policy, in that she never allowed her domestic staff to work more than eight hours a day, she was extremely difficult to please.

While she always criticized the fickleness of human nature, she carried on an unrelenting search for the ideal servant to the end of her days, even after she had been sadly disillusioned by Bessie.

Bessie worked for Aunt Harriet for three years.

During that time she so gained my aunt's confidence, that she was put in charge of the domestic staff.

Aunt Harriet could not find words to praise Bessie's industriousness and efficiency.

In addition to all her other qualifications, Bessie was an expert cook.

She acted the role of the perfect servant for three years before Aunt Harriet discovered her ' little ‘weakness'.

After being absent from the Gables for a week, my aunt unexpectedly returned one afternoon with a party of guests and instructed Bessie to prepare dinner.

No only was the meal well below the usual standard, but Bessie seemed unable to walk steadily.

She bumped into the furniture and kept mumbling about the guests.

When she came in with the last course ——a huge pudding ——she tripped on the carpet and the pudding went flying through the air, narrowly missed my aunt, and crashed on the dining table with considerable force.

Though this caused great mirth among the guests, Aunt Harriet was horrified.

She reluctantly came to the conclusion that Bessie was drunk.

The guests had, of course, realized this from the moment Bessie opened the door for them and, long before the final catastrophe, had had a difficult time trying to conceal their amusement.

The poor girl was dismissed instantly.

After her departure, Aunt Harriet discovered that there were piles of empty wine bottles of all shapes and sizes neatly stacked in what had once been Bessie's wardrobe.

They had mysteriously found their way there from the wine cellar!

Lesson 50 New Year resolutions 新年的决心

The New Year is a time for resolutions.

Mentally, at least, most of us could compile formidable lists of ' dos' and ' don' ts'.

The same old favorites recur year in year out with monotonous regularity.

We resolve to get up earlier each morning, eat less, find more time to play with the children, do a thousand and one jobs about the house, be nice to people we don't like, drive carefully, and take the dog for a walk every day.

Past experience has taught us that certain accomplishments are beyond attainment.

If we remain inveterate smokers, it is only because we have so often experienced the frustration that results from failure.

Most of us fail in our efforts at self-improvement because our schemes are too ambitious and we never have time to carry them out.

We also make the fundamental error of announcing our resolutions to everybody so that we look even more foolish when we slip back into our bad old ways.

Aware of these pitfalls, this year I attempted to keep my resolutions to myself.

I limited myself to two modest ambitions: to do physical exercise every morning and to read more of an evening.

An all-night party on New Year's Eve provided me with a good excuse for not carrying out either of these new resolutions on the first day of the year, but on the second, I applied myself assiduously to the task.

The daily exercises lasted only eleven minutes and I proposed to do them early in the morning before anyone had got up.

The self-discipline required to drag myself out of bed eleven minutes earlier than usual was considerable.

Nevertheless, I managed to creep down into the living room for two days before anyone found me out.

After jumping about on the carpet and twisting the human frame into uncomfortable positions, I sat down at the breakfast table in an exhausted condition.

It was this that betrayed me.

The next morning the whole family trooped in to watch the performance.

That was really unsettling, but I fended off the taunts and jibes of the family good-humouredly and soon everybody got used to the idea.

However, my enthusiasm waned.

The time I spent at exercises gradually diminished.

Little by little the eleven minutes fell to zero.

By January 10th, I was back to where I had started from.

I argued that if I spent less time exhausting myself at exercises in the morning, I would keep my mind fresh for reading when I got home from work.

Resisting the hypnotizing effect of television, I sat in my room for a few evenings with my eyes glued to a book.

One night, however, feeling cold and lonely, I went downstairs and sat in front of the television pretending to read.

That proved to be my undoing, for I soon got back to my old bad habit of dozing off in front of the screen.

I still haven't given up my resolution to do more reading.

In fact, I have just bought a book entitled How to Read a Thousand Words a Minute.

Perhaps it will solve my problem, but I just haven't had time to read it!

Lesson 51 Predicting the future 预测未来

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult.

Who could have imagined, in the mid 1970s, for example, that by the end of the20th century, computers would be as common in people's homes as TV sets?

In the 1970s, computers were common enough, but only in big business, government departments, and large organizations.

These were the so-called mainframe machines.

Mainframe computers were very large indeed, often occupying whole air-conditioned rooms, employing full-time technicians and run on specially-written software.

Though these large machines still exist, many of their functions have been taken over by small powerful personal computers, commonly known as PCs.

In 1975, a primitive machine called the Altair, was launched in the USA.

It can properly be described as the first "home computer' and it pointed the way to the future.

This was followed, at the end of the 1970s, by a machine called an Apple.

In the early 1980s, the computer giant, IBM produced the world's first Personal Computer.

This ran on an ' operating system' called DOS, produced by a then small company named Microsoft.

The IBM Personal Computer was widely copied.

From those humble beginnings, we have seen the development of the user-friendly home computers and multimedia machines which are in common use today.

Considering how recent these developments are, it is even more remarkable that as long ago as the1960s, an Englishman, Leon Bagrit, was able to predict some of the uses of computers which we know today.

Bagrit dismissed the idea that computers would learn to 'think' for themselves and would ' rule the world', which people liked to believe in those days.

Bagrit foresaw a time when computers would be small enough to hold in the hand, when they would be capable of providing information about traffic jams and suggesting alternative routes, when they would be used in hospitals to help doctors to diagnose illnesses, when they would relieve office workers and accountants of dull, repetitive clerical work.

All these computer uses have become commonplace.

Of course, Leon Bagrit could not possibly have foreseen the development of the Internet, the worldwide system that enables us to communicate instantly with anyone in any part of the world by using computers linked to telephone networks.