Engelsk A
Studentereksamen
1. delprøve, uden hjælpemidler kl. 9.00 - 10.00
stx132-ENG/A-22082013
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Nedenstående rubrikker udfyldes.
Efter prøven afleveres dette hæfte med din besvarelse til en ilsynsførende. t stx132-ENG/A-22082013
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Besvarelsen afleveres kl. 10.00
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Besvar opgaverne i A – D
A
Ret fejlene i følgende sætninger, og forklar på dansk dine rettelser. Brug relevant grammatisk/faglig terminologi. Der er kun én fejl i hver sætning. Skriv den korrekte sætning på linjerne nedenunder.
1.
Two lightning bolts hitted an Airbus A380 in a terrible thunderstorm.
2.
Modern historians claim that the king reigned successful for 17 years.
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3.
He is carpenter, but he would very much like to work in a bank.
4.
Some scientists objects to the idea of artificial intelligence.
5.
The police had given up finding the ones whom had robbed the bank.
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6.
A child will be mentally damaged if learning not includes play and fun and games.
7.
The financial crisis has shown that money do not grow on trees.
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B
I følgende sætningspar er et adverbialled (biled) kursiveret.
1.
Forklar for hver sætning, hvor adverbialleddet er placeret i forhold til sætningens verballed (udsagnsled).
2.
Forklar for hvert par forskellen på adverbialleddets betydning i de to sætninger. Skriv dit svar på dansk.
1a. Jamie Oliver cooks his food naturally.
1b. Naturally, Jamie Oliver cooks his food before he serves it.
2a. She spoke thankfully about the huge support from her friends during her illness.
2b. Thankfully, only material damage occurred.
3a. Seriously, you are not going to do that.
3b. You cannot take that seriously.
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C
Nedenstående tekst er et uddrag af et abstract fra en videnskabelig artikel. Gør kort rede for karakteristiske stil- og genretræk. Underbyg din besvarelse med eksempler fra teksten. Skriv dit svar på dansk.
1
5
Purpose
Age-related macular1 degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of severe and irreversible2 vision loss3 in the Western world. […] This review evaluates the epidemiological evidence associating smoking with AMD.
Methods
Systematic review of published epidemiological studies evaluated against established criteria for evidence of a causal relationship.
Results
In total, 17 studies […] were included in the review. A total of 13 studies found a statistically significant association between smoking and AMD with increased risk of
AMD of two- to three-fold4 in current-smokers compared with never-smokers. Five studies found no association between smoking and AMD. […]
10
Conclusion
The literature review confirmed a strong association between current smoking and
AMD […] . Cigarette smoking is likely to have toxic5 effects on the retina6. In spite of the strength of this evidence, there appears to be a lack of awareness about the risks of developing eye disease from smoking among both healthcare professionals and the general public.
National Center for Biotechnology Information
macula lutea, den gule plet (et bestemt område på øjets nethinde) uoprettelig
3
vision loss: synstab
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to til tre gange højere
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giftig
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nethinden
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2
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D
Oversæt følgende tekst til engelsk.
Byen New Orleans ligger majestætisk ved Mississippi-floden i det sydøstlige Louisiana i
USA. På grund af denne beliggenhed var byen tidligere en yderst vigtig havneby.
Som følge heraf er New Orleans i dag en by med en meget sammensat kultur. Her findes en enestående blanding af sprog og traditioner, som forskellige etniske grupper gennem tiden har bidraget med.
I 2005 blev byen ramt af orkanen Katrina, som forårsagede voldsomme ødelæggelser og adskillige dødsfald, men det er lykkedes byen delvist at genopbygge det ødelagte.
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Opgaven er produceret med anvendelse af kvalitetsstyringssystemet ISO 9001 og miljøledelsessystemet ISO 14001
Engelsk A
Studentereksamen
2. delprøve kl. 9.00 - 14.00
stx132-ENG/A-22082013
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Answer either A or B
A
Write an essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse and interpret Bernie
McGill’s short story “No Angel”.
Part of your essay must focus on the composition and on the use of supernatural elements. Text Bernie McGill, “No Angel”, 2010. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 2
B
Write an essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse and comment on Jeanette
Winterson’s essay “Once Upon a Shop”.
Part of your essay must focus on the style of the writer’s language, and on how history is used in the text. Text Jeanette Winterson, “Once Upon a Shop”, 2010. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7
Teksternes ortografi og tegnsætning følger forlæggene. Trykfejl er dog rettet.
Opsætningen følger ikke nødvendigvis forlæggene. Dog følges forlægget nøje, hvor opsætningen på den ene eller anden måde indgår i opgaven.
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A
Bernie McGill was born in Northern Ireland. The short story is from the anthology
The Best British Short Stories 2011. It takes place in contemporary Northern Ireland.
Bernie McGill
No Angel
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The first time I saw my father after he died, I was in the shower, hair plastered with conditioner, when the water stuttered and turned cold. He was at the sink in front of the misted-up mirror with the tap running, his back to me. It was two weeks after his funeral. His things were all where he’d left them.
“Them tiles would need re-grouting,” he said, and pointed his razor at the salmonpink mould that was growing below the mirror.
I stared at him through the circle I’d wiped in the shower door. “I didn’t know you’d be able to do that,” I said.
“Oh yes,” he said, “any decent tradesman would sort that out for you.” The twitch of a smile; thran1 as before.
He looked more or less the same. When he turned his face to scrape the razor along his jaw, I could see that the scar was healing well, where the surgeon had removed the growth from the side of his nose. His skin was more yellow maybe; more so at the nicotine-stained finger tips.
“Are they treating you well?” I asked him.
“So, so. The food’s not great. Nothing seems to have much of a taste.”
“I suppose you empty the salt cellar over it still?”
“What harm’s it going to do me now?”
I looked at him, at the thin white hair curling at the back of his neck from the steam in the bathroom; the earth under his fingernails.
“I’m getting cold,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said, bending to splash water on his face, his knees creaking, “I’m going now anyway,” and away he went.
The next time I saw him, I was on the train, on the way to Belfast sitting opposite a girl in a green bobble hat, when his face appeared in the window to my left. I looked back at the girl in her small round glasses, breaking off squares of chocolate with her teeth, at the umbilical iPod threading its way from her ear to her pocket. But outside, reflected in the glass, it was his face skimming over the fields. It was early December; there was a skin of snow on the hedges, green showing through; a slick of ice on the flooded grass. A bad time to spread slurry, he would have said. I’d never been on a train with him before. stubborn
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35
“We used to ride to Knockarlet,” he said smiling his crooked smile, showing a bottom row of neglected teeth, “me and your mother. Left the bikes at the station and took the train to the Port for the Big Sunday. It’s years since I was on a train.” […]
I loved that photo we had in the house, the pair of them strolling down the Prom arm in arm, her in her swing coat and curled hair, him in his wide lapels, a cigarette hanging off his right hand. They looked like film stars; the ghosts of their young selves. I used to pore over it as a teenager, wondering who they had been then, before me and then
Robbie were born into their lives; before we wrenched love from them, and left again.
[…]
40
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Christmas week, I was invited out to dinner with Thomas’s parents. Situation vacant: prospective daughter-in-law. I watched them process my details: a good lecturing job, attentive, soft-spoken, a bit long in the tooth for grandchildren, possibly, but these days you never know. They were far too middle class for religion to be an issue. The restaurant was over-heated; I’d gulped down too many nervous glasses of Sauvignon
Blanc and had stepped outside for a breath of air. Daddy legged it1 out from a bus shelter on the far side of the road; dodged over between breaks in the headlights, a greasy brown paper bag in his hand.
“Are you going to marry thawn2 boy?” he said. Not so much as a “Hullo”.
“You know his name, Daddy.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“He hasn’t asked me.”
He sighed through his nose, and his breath came out in two puffs of mist. “I never knew you were that oulfashioned,” he said. The smell of chip fat and vinegar. “What’s in the bag?” I said.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“Neither did you.”
A couple came out the restaurant door; a blast of voices and heat, garlic and alcohol.
“He’ll never set foot on my farm,” he said.
“He’s a Maths teacher, Daddy. He doesn’t want your farm.”
“He says that now,” he grunted. “But they’re all the same: hungry land grabbers every last one of them. He’ll not get it. Not after what we went through to keep it.” He wrung the paper bag into a twist, fired it into a nearby bin.
“Not everybody’s after your land, Daddy.”
“Have you forgotten what they did to your brother, Annie? The way they left him, lying on the road like a bag of rubbish the binmen had forgotten to lift? What it did to your mother, to see him like that?”
I gritted my teeth: “It wasn’t Thomas did that.”
“Him or his kind. I make no difference between them.” […]
My brother Robbie wasn’t the son my father had had in mind for himself. Daddy was a teetotaller all his life: the only drink we ever had in the house was a drop of poteen legged it: ran fast (her) that
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he kept for a sick cow. And my father was quiet, rarely raised his voice, except maybe to curse at a referee, or a traffic warden. Robbie, on the other hand, was loud, drank too much, lost all his money on poker machines, stole fags out of Daddy’s coat pocket, took no interest in cattle rearing. He had a great sense of himself as unquashable, shot his mouth off when the rest of us knew how to stay dumb; had never learnt caution the way most people had in our uneasy mixed community. Some of the time I admired him for it; wished I could speak without looking to the left and right of me first. He wasn’t involved in anything, people round here would have known that: if he had been, Daddy would have knocked it out of him himself. All he wanted was to join a rock band and
“get the hell out of this backwater”. The eighties were a nervous time, and things were worse after something big: Loughgall, Enniskillen, Milltown, Ballygawley1. Those were the times when people walked about careful, eyes to the ground. Robbie never eyed the ground. You’d think, then, he’d have seen it coming, what hit him in the face. A mallet, the coroner said, the type that was used to bash in fenceposts. They never found it.
Strange thing, though, he walked like Daddy: shoulders forward, great loping strides.
Three years younger than me, and every step of his was one and a half of mine. I could never keep up with him. He was seventeen and built like a stick and mad about his guitar. He’d just failed his driving test and had called in the pub, where he shouldn’t have been, and was walking home. They must have followed him out. It was December, dark by four and bone-cold. The coroner said he thought a car had hit him: after the beating, he said, when he had been left on the road. He couldn’t be sure but there was evidence the body had been dragged. It was a neighbour that found him, picked him out in the car headlights. Daddy insisted on an open coffin, despite Robbie’s eyebrow like a burst plum, his buckled nose, the rainbow of bruises that spanned his battered face.
Despite Mum saying, “Let people remember him the way he was.” …
“No,” he’d insisted. “Let everybody see what they did to him. Let everybody look and know what savages we’re living amongst.”
They never got anybody for it, but ever since, there’s been neighbours of ours that couldn’t look us in the eye. Mum lasted six months of barely speaking, food hardly passing her lips. She dropped like a stone one day in the kitchen; never spoke again.
“Your mother,” Daddy said to me, like he had to apologise for her leaving, “ … her heart never mended.” Then it was just me and him, for nearly twenty-two years, until his lungs gave way, and the breath left him too.
In one of the bad times, around Hallowe’en, a month or two before Robbie was killed,
I was home from University and Mum asked me to go in the front room and bring her in the sewing basket that she kept under the bed. I knelt down on the burgundy carpet, lifted the valance sheet, and there was the shotgun, quiet as you like. Daddy had always kept one: he and Uncle Joe went shooting for pheasant every Boxing Day. And if there was a wedding in the townland, he’d take it out, shoot a cartridge or two in the air to send the bride off. But the rest of the time he kept it locked up in the built-in wardrobe. oughgall, Enniskillen, Milltown, Ballygawley: places associated with bombings carried out by the Irish
L
Republican Army (IRA)
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He was normally very careful about it. I carried the basket back in to the kitchen.
“Why’s the gun under your bed?”
“Thread that for me, will you?” she said. She sat with Daddy’s good trousers on her lap, pressing the unravelled hem between her finger and thumb. I held the needle up to the light, laced the grey thread through. “Two or three times,” she said, “a car has driven into the yard at night. No lights: we hear the wheels on the gravel.” She took the needle from me, wound a knot into the end of the thread. “Your father says if any of them tries to get in, he’ll shoot first, ask questions later.”
“Why would anybody … ?”
“There’s people, Annie, that needs no excuse. We’re the wrong sort for them, that’s all; in the wrong place. They’d like to see the back of us.” And she pushed the needle into the hem and started to sew.
I was glad to get back to Belfast. The threat in the city never felt personal. A bomb scare on University Road and everybody piled back in to bed: lectures cancelled for the morning. The night the explosion went off at the Lisburn Road police station, the whole of our rented house shook. Eight girls on the landing in their pyjamas and then down to the kitchen to stand bare-footed on the cracked, snail-slimed lino, warming our hands around cups of tea, listening for the sirens: second-hand drama. Not like a dark car in your own yard at night; not like a shotgun under the bed.
The next time I saw my father after he died, it was night and I was driving over the bog road near Castlenagree with the windscreen wipers doing battle against the rain, and
Bob Dylan on the radio, “Like a Rolling Stone”. I’d turned the music up full and was giving it welly1: “How does it feel … ?”
“What’s that oul’ shite you’re listening to?” he said, and near put me off the road. A twitter of a laugh: “That would deave2 you,” and his arm reached out, and turned down the dial. There was a green light off the dashboard; my fists tight on the steering wheel.
“What happened to your hand?” he said. A small black crescent of soot ingrained above my knuckles.
“You know rightly what happened to it,” I told him, “putting the life out of me in the coal house last night. I hit it against the shovel.” He was silent. The sound of his skinroughened finger and thumb, rubbing together. “Knocking the door against the back of my heels,” I said. “You know I don’t like the dark.”
“It was maybe the wind.”
“There wasn’t a breath, you needn’t deny it. I smelt Benson & Hedges3.”
“I’ve given up the smokes,” he said. “They were a shocking price, getting.”
“Your timing’s not great.”
The rain was coming down harder, troughing water along the sides of the road. I could smell the damp wool of his jacket, drying in the fan, and something underneath it, something familiar, coal tar soap. at the top of my voice deafen
3
Benson & Hedges: cigarette brand
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“Does this seat not go back?” he said, grappling for the lever at the side. “That
Thomas boy must be a right shortarse. My knees is killing me.” I was silent, not rising to the bait. […]
“You know, Annie. I would never scare you like that. That wasn’t me at the coal house door.”
I kept my eyes on the road as we rounded a bend.
Then I said, “Daddy, do you ever see … ?” but when I turned my head, the seat beside me was empty.
He needn’t have bothered with the jibes about Thomas: we didn’t last. I think it was
Thomas’s confidence I fell for: his belief in my ability to love him back; his faith in the world’s acceptance of us both. He never questioned his right to be anywhere. He was entirely without arrogance but he stood and talked and put one foot after the other with absolute unshakeable conviction. I think, maybe, if I’m honest, he reminded me of
Robbie. It was never going to work. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up the suitable daughter-in-law show for a whole lifetime.
Daddy made occasional appearances after that. […]
Then one night in May at the Opera House, a staff outing to The Bartered Bride1 and me bored witless, I tore my eyes away from Marenka2 in her embroidered apron and glanced up at the boxes and there he was: good grey suit, opera glasses in his hand. He who had never set foot in a theatre in his life.
“What are you doing here?” I mouthed up at him. “Keeping an eye on him,” he said and he stuck out his elbow and nudged the man beside him: Robbie, in an over-sized bow tie, with his face back the way it used to be. “I told you it wasn’t me at the coal house door.”
Robbie was scanning the audience. “There she is,” he said, and pointed to a small woman, three rows ahead in a turquoise dress with winged shoulder pads. The woman turned and looked up and waved: Mum out in her finery. Neither she nor Robbie looked at me.
“You found them,” I said.
“I did,” Daddy said.
“They look well.” He nodded and smiled. “Will you leave me alone now?” I asked him.
He looked down at his hands. “I was right about thawn Thomas boy,” he said. “He wasn’t your match.”
“I won’t be told who to love by you,” I said.
“I know.”
I looked around at the packed auditorium, at Mum’s shining eyes, back up at him and
Robbie. “I’ll see you, then,” I said.
I could see his mouth move. “You know where we are,” he said, and then the song ended, and the audience rose up in applause and blocked my view with their bellowing elbows and the backs of their nodding heads.
(2010)
The Bartered Bride: a comic opera the protagonist
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B
Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) is a British writer. The essay was first published in The
Observer, June 13, 2010. The text is about Jeanette Winterson’s vegetable shop located in Spitalfields in the East End of London.
Jeanette Winterson
Once Upon a Shop
I opened my first fruit and veg shop in
Spitalfields in 1805…
At least that is how it feels to me because my 1790’s tiny London
5 townhouse plus shop started selling Kent cabbages and Irish potatoes during the
Napoleonic Wars and the year of the
Battle of Trafalgar. While Nelson was gunning the French, we were selling
10 onions the size of cannonballs.
My shop is right opposite Spitalfields
Market, now full of chic shops and funky stalls, but formally the fruit and veg market for London, just as Covent
15 Garden was the flower market, Smithfield
Jeanette Winterson outside her store Verde in
Spitalfields.
Photograph: Dan Chung for The Observer
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the meat market, and Billingsgate the fishmarket. Spitalfields – named after the Priory hospital for lepers that stood on the market
20 site in the Middle Ages – was outside the old city wall, and something of a lawless land. The costermongers who carted their veg in from Essex and Kent were known for fighting and thievery, and
25 when the Intoxicating Liquor Act was first introduced in 1872, market taverns were available to avoid restricted opening hours.
When I first came to Spitalfields, The
Ten Bells pub was still an all-nighter,
30 and about four in the morning, when the market was in full swing loading up for the coming day, the place was packed with night-workers. Tarts off-shift used to come in for a gin and a bag of veg. Market
35 porters had a pint of beer and a round of figs. It was strange, because among the drunk, the destitute, the damned, the disguised celebrities, con-men and crooks, were the market men who always seemed
40 to bring their fruit and veg with them.
There was one who drank Guinness and ate raw onions. He said it was better than antibiotics. No one who lived round the market
45 when Spitalfields was slummy and hard-
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working paid for fruit and veg. And the endless tramps building fires from chucked pallets, roasted potatoes in tins and made mish-mash soups from anything
50 going.
The market has moved out to Nine
Elms now, and the pyramids of oranges, gassed lemons, King Kong-size bananas, forests of parsley, potato towers and crates
55 of peas, red tomatoes, pink grapefruit, deep-stacked beetroot, all as creatively piled as anything in Tate Modern1, have made room for bankers and lawyers and sharp urban trendies.
60
So much so that in 2005 my modest
Georgian building with its restored shop front but no shop was targeted by a coffee company who wanted a long lease for a lot of money. Suddenly I was going into
65 trade…
It looked great on paper; I would keep the upper floors for my own use, and the ground floor and basement would be for coffee. I like coffee, and I liked
70 the historical neatness of returning a shop to the building, but as I researched the company, who I can’t name because
I signed a confidentiality agreement, I realised that, for me, it was the wrong
75 coffee and the wrong politics.
I really believe that the small decisions we take profoundly influence the bigger picture. I was vegetarian for nine years, not because I object to eating animals,
80 but because I object to factory farming.
Long before the organic movement made it possible to easily buy humane meats and veg grown without pesticides,
I was bartering with ageing hippies on
85 smallholdings, trying to get my own food supply sorted out.
I learned about the politics of food
through eating it. I got curious about where everything had come from and how
90 it was grown and harvested. I was one of those mad people who did early recycling by unpacking it all at the supermarket till – so annoying for everyone behind you. I wasn’t a saint or a do-gooder, or
95 even much of an activist, but it seemed to me that food was more important than anything. For a while we had hens in London and our long back garden was a veggie plot.
100 When I left London and moved to the
Cotswolds, the first thing I did was plant potatoes. That move to the country was the reason for buying the little house and
105 shop in Spitalfields. The place had been for sale for fifteen years because nobody except Gilbert and George2 and Dan
Cruickshank3 wanted to live in the falling apart houses huddled round the noisy rat
110 infested veg market.
My house had been the offices of an oranges importer – which seemed auspicious as my first novel was Oranges
Are Not The Only Fruit. Then I found
115 out that the business had been called JW
Fruits – so I had to buy it, didn’t I?
Immediately after the money had exchanged hands, the Council slapped a
Dangerous Structure on the front door
120 and wrapped the building in an orange net. The next two years of my life were about fixing the building and finding out about food chains and food supplies – that’s what happens if you hang round a
125 working market all night.
It never occurred to me to open a food shop. The coffee offer forced me to focus on what I would really like to Gilbert and George: two British artists an Cruickshank: a BBC television presenter with a
D
special interest in the history of architecture
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Tate Modern: art museum in London
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happen, instead of either doing nothing, or passively accepting what someone else would like to happen – so it was a pretty good life lesson too.
A friend took me down to the famous 175
St John’s Restaurant in Smithfield – the
135 nose to tail eating started by chef supremo
Fergus Henderson. There, among the pig’s ears and whelk punnets, I started a plan with Harvey Cabaniss, a food loving New 180
Yorker trained by Fergus, with all the
140 can-do and brio1 that makes Americans so endearing. Harvey wanted to run his own food shop and deli, with catering on the
185
side, but rents were a problem.
I had the building. Harvey had the
145 skills and the energy. We had a deal…
The shop front had been restored by me back to the original, but with the
190
1930’s signage above the door. Verde it says, and we decided that Verde it should
150 stay.
Harvey set about installing a grand espresso machine so that you can have
195
some coffee while your peas are being weighed. As we do the best coffee in
155 London, with the possible exception of the London Review of Books café, we get a lot of Italians coming by, so much
200
so that Harvey has now hired his own flamboyant Italian baristas. Go into Verde
160 any morning and it sounds like, and tastes like, Naples.
Harvey and I are of the same mind
205
about the quality of food, though he doesn’t see eye to eye with me on organics
165 for their own sake. I accept that I am purist. He accepts that I will moan about selling fancy eggs and any asparagus not
210
from the Vale of Evesham.
I love his energy and the fact that the
170 shop is always changing. Now you can
130
energy and confidence
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eat lunch there, and the food is always seasonal and inspired and it changes every day. In winter you might get a pheasant soup. Today it could be early broadbeans with new season English lamb.
In the UK running a small food shop is really hard work. We do not do as other countries in Europe do, and implement a sliding-scale business rate – so Verde has to pay the same money as an estate agent or a mobile phone outlet. I think this is wrong. If we want the delightful sustainable small shops we all adore in France or Italy, we have to persuade government to be realistic about the rates.
There is no such thing as cheap food
– there is the real cost, and then there are subsidies or mark-ups. It is as simple as that. Supermarkets endless re-route the sustainability argument into an argument about affordable food for the poor. But this is misleading. Good food need not be expensive, but it cannot be so cheap that the land is degraded, the workers underpaid and the animals reared and slaughtered in a way that would make any decent person sick with disgust.
Ethical eating means factoring in real costs and real conditions. Ethical eating is also a question of how we want to shop and what kind of shops we would like to support. Questions about what makes a neighbourhood better? Questions about pleasure as well as utility.
I like a neighbourhood – and that is not the same as a road leading to a supermarket. Verde is a corner shop where everyone drops in. People who live in Spitalfields come to us for a gossip and a cake. Kids stop by on their way home from school for sweets. We are in a terrace of shops and cafes that serves the offices and visitors, of course, but
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that is integral to the street life of the
260
neighbourhood.
Harvey sells good food, and he makes things look beautiful. I walk by in the morning and he is putting out foxgloves
220 in pots to set off the baskets of vegetables.
He chats to everyone – if he knows you, 265 the coffee is free. Warm food smells bubble up from the pans of soup and the
Parma ham is sliced fresh and see-through
225 from a hand-operated bright red Italian
270
slicer. Buy something or don’t, walking past Verde makes you feel better. There isn’t a way of pricing that.
I worry that everything we do is about
230 price. The things that give us pleasure
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can’t be costed in a straightforward balance sheet way. The bottom line isn’t profit; it is being human.
We are just coming through an
235 experiment in turning the whole planet
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and all of its resources and all of its people into a money-making machine. We de-regulated everything, and what has happened? Global economic melt-down
240 and the Gulf of Mexico.
Now we are told that there is no money 285 and we will have to live differently – but the difference is not being offered as sustainability or new values – it will
245 be the same old unelected big business interests. As people we will have even less 290 power. What can we do?
I started the shop because I believe that
250 working from the bottom up is a good idea. Verde can’t tackle Tesco1 round the 295 corner, nor can it change the fixed supply chains and discounting that make it so hard for small shops to compete with big
255 business.
But I think of us, and others like us as 300 a pocket of air in an upturned boat. We are a breathing space.
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I don’t like the chilly world of corporate retail – not the foodshops, not the bookshops, not the chainstores. I prefer individuality and eccentricity and self-determination – all the things the free market is supposed to deliver, and never does, because markets soon become homogenous and anti-competitive.
We live in a cloned world where there is no real choice – so when I see Verde on the corner, and there’s Harvey sweeping the street or cleaning his windows before starting the day, and he’s been up since five because he wanted to roast a suckling pig, I know he’s doing all this not for big money but because it is his own life in his own way.
What is the point of being human if you cannot live your own life in your way? It is such a simple obvious ambition
– and so hard to achieve.
I am glad I didn’t take the money for the coffee shop. I would have been just another anonymous space spin-doctored into a ‘friendly’ brand. I don’t want to add yet another brand – yet another bit of cosy fakery all about money while pretending to be about ‘you’.
There’s a lot of talk about re-vitalising the High Street. There’s a lot of nostalgia for little shops – especially food shops that sell lovely things to eat. We call it niche, we think of it as a bit toy-town, just as people say that organic and sustainable farming can’t feed the world.
My view is that if we want things to be different we should use all our effort and ingenuity to make things different.
Sustainable farming is viable. Small shops could be well-supplied and profitable – just because Britain used to have the worst food and the worst food shops in Europe doesn’t mean that we do any more, or that only supermarkets offer variety. supermarket chain
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The politics of food – the everyday
305 politics of what we put on our plates, affect the whole world at one end of the scale, and the boarded up high street with no butcher or baker at the other end of the scale. We can let big business bamboozle
310 us into believing that small is selfindulgent and ineffective, or we can look closer, and take back some power.
Every day from now on, in new austerity Britain, where the Post Office
can’t be subsidised but banks can, and where we all have to pay more, except the big businesses who are going to be allowed tax breaks to ‘re-vitalise’ the economy – there is even talk of giving
320 Tesco tax breaks to open stores – every day we will be told how things have to be
– but why?
Small, sustainable, ethical, modestly profitable, local, co-operative. Go on –
325 open your own shop…
315
(2010)
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Anvendt materiale (til brug for Copydan):
National Center for Biotechnology Information website, viewed August 2012. (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Bernie McGill. “No Angel”. 2010. Ed. Nicholas Royle. The Best British Short Stories 2011. London: Salt
Publishing, 2011.
Jeanette Winterson. “Once Upon a Shop”. 2010. First published in The Observer, June 13, 2010.
Reprinted from Jeanette Winterson website, viewed August 2012. (www.jeanettewinterson.com)
Image credit: “Jeanette Winterson outside her store Verde in Spitalfields. Photograph: Dan Chung for
The Observer.” The Guardian website, February 6, 2012, viewed August 2012. (www.guardian.co.uk)
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Opgaven er produceret med anvendelse af kvalitetsstyringssystemet ISO 9001 og miljøledelsessystemet ISO 14001
