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Some Summer Ideas

Year 6 (2015-2016) (Becoming Y7 in Sept 2016)

1Paul’’s Learning Enrichment Pack Summer 2016

Remember from last year how helpful and important it was to work through some summer exercises. This is new version for this year but along the same lines.

First, read through the booklet. Please do what follows each piece, whether that is typing in definitions, looking at hyperlinks, finding visual images etc. With each article, you should look up the highlighted words and define them and, when instructed, in the tables. In some cases, you are also again asked to find suitable visual images to help fix and explore the meaning in your mind. Do talk to your family and discuss the reading with them. There is plenty to chew on. Make sure that you try to complete the definition and image tables. You must complete this document as an electronic Word document and give it to me at the beginning of term. Please remember to SAVE as you go along and be sensible about sizing and then embedding the pictures When you e-mail it, please make sure you label it as follows:

Surname Form (The form you will be in Sept 2016) LED e.g., Einstein 7? LED

‘They can, because they think they can!’ Virgil

2Paul’’s Learning Enrichment Pack Summer 2016

This makes it easier for us to save and look at them. The booklets can then printed off at school and we use them in enrichment lessons and mock interviews.

You may be asked to discuss them on your return in your English Enrichment Comprehension (and possible scholarship classes) and with the Head and others. Make sure that you have looked up the words you do not know!

There is no excuse for saying you cannot do this! Ask your friends; prod your family and ask the budgie. But, do not leave this blank or scrawled in biro/pencil and say in September, with tears in your eyes: ‘It is just like last year, in Year 5: OMG, I cannot believe it: Once again, we didn’t have a dictionary or Wi-Fi at any point in the summer and my dad’s office blew up and mum dropped her Mac in the sea when we were in St. Tropez & then I sprained my typing-wrist water-skiing. Honestly, …Paul! Why are you laughing?’ My aunt will back me up (and she is a lawyer.) Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that I suffered temporary paralysis of the hands in August too. ’Boris Johnson stole my memory stick. Michael Gove put it in a jar of boiling water…..

Just do it! You will actually enjoy learning these new things! All the stuff is worth reading!

‘It had a big impact ‘I bitterly regret not looking more seriously at Paul’s booklet ‘ I intend to read this carefully and e mail it to my friends!’ on my development and success.

Paul’s Learning Enrichment Pack Y6 2016 3

Avengers Age of Ultron : review by Robbie Collin for the Telegraph.

The Marvel superheroes return in Joss Whedon's super-indulgent but refreshingly human blockbuster

Everything about Avengers: Age of Ultron feels indulgent. Watching the film is like ploughing through a TV box set in a single sitting. That’s meant as a compliment, and if it sounds like a criticism, you’re probably yet to experience the supreme contentedness that comes with bingeing on five Game of Thrones episodes back-to-back.

Joss Whedon’s film gives you that same pop-culture sugar rush, stacking characters, conflicts, subplots and background treats like tiers of wedding cake – far more than you’d think you could possibly cram into a little under two and a half hours without the whole thing crumbling under the weight of its own calorie count. But the structure holds, and the film flies past at speed. Among its other attributes, it’s the first long blockbuster in years to feel short.

Avengers: Age of Ultron rounds off the second two-year phase of Marvel Studios’ ongoing superhero serial, just as the fun but messier Avengers Assemble, also directed by Whedon, did the same thing for phase one in 2012.

It literally hits the ground running, with a three-minute, digitally crocheted tracking shot of the whole gang – Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) – hurtling through a frozen forest. Their destination is a Colditz-like castle where the terrorist group Hydra have in their clutches a crystal of (literally) Earth-shattering importance.

The sequence plays out like a pyrotechnic relay race, with the camera swooping between characters as they swat aside the enemy troops like broken toys. It’s a blistering opening, and a call-back to the similarly staged climactic battle in the previous Avengers film. But by starting out with this big gasp of a set piece, Whedon also seeds the idea that some kind of dramatic exhalation must follow – and when the characters begin on a high, the only possible direction they can go is down.

4Paul’s Learning Enrichment Pack Y6 2016

Which is, of course, what happens. For stealing this fire of the gods, the Avengers undergo a kind of Promethean fall from grace – banishment at the hands of the Zeus-like Ultron, a sentient artificial intelligence programme bent on the destruction of the human race. His two reluctant sidekicks are a pair of new rogue heroes, Elizabeth Olsen’s psychic Scarlet Witch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s super-fast Quicksilver – much improved over the alternative version of the character who briefly popped up in last year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. Ultron himself is voiced with a dyspeptic sneer by James Spader (the sound, it should be said, is not a million miles from Michael Keaton’s growling super-ego in Birdman) and is hosted in a metal body of his own design, with Predator-like mandibles and surprisingly shapely chrome buttocks.

Since this is a film by Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the mix of myth, pop and camp is business as usual, and he also throws in a bit of Frankenstein and some apocalyptic, William Blake-inspired tableaux for good measure. The result is a lot of everything, but the film never feels overcrowded: in fact, it’s the interplay between the film’s many different characters, rather than the blow-up-the-world crisis they’re trying to defuse, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Hawkeye, very much the Ringo of the Avengers up to this point, gets a substantial moment in the spotlight, while Don Cheadle’s War Machine becomes both the subject, and teller, of a fun running joke. Best of all are Johansson’s Black Widow and Ruffalo’s Hulk, whose civilian alternates, Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner, have an unexpectedly complex relationship that has them flirting, screwball-style, over cocktails at a glamorous bar in one scene, then having a startlingly honest conversation about their respective futures in another.

I’ll confess to wincing a little at Johansson’s previous appearances in the series, and the way this brilliant actress seemed to have been cast for not much more than the ability to bend over in a leather catsuit. But this goes a long way towards solving Marvel’s women problem – Johansson and Ruffalo’s performances would be memorably good even in a non-superhero film, and have a genuine emotional wrench.

And when you realise you’d happily watch an Avengers movie in which the superheroes didn’t even bother to leave the house, you twig that Whedon’s really onto something. Blockbusters tend to be primarily concerned with


problems of physics: what happens, for example, when an immovable chin meets an irresistible fist. But Whedon’s specialist subject is chemistry. He just loves mixing different elements together and watching them react

The film hardly falls short when it comes to ker-blamming, and there are some terrifically exciting city showdowns in South Korea and fictional former-Soviet and East African republics (a nice change from San Francisco and New York). But throughout, there’s a sweetly old-fashioned determination on the Avengers’ part to keep the lowly likes of you and me out of harm’s way, with shots of cars being hoisted back from the edge of precipices and lost children being whisked back to their parents.

Could this be the white-gloved hand of Disney at work (the corporation bought Marvel Studios in 2009)? Or a pushing back against the consequence-free carnage of the Transformers films, Man of Steel and so on? Either way it’s highly welcome, and gives Age of Ultron its own distinctive, retro-comfort-food flavour. I could manage another one right now.


Tricky word of phrase Definition Can you write another sentence showing you know it?super-indulgentblockbustercontentednessbingeing indulge in an activity,

especially eating, to excess.My brother is binging on ice –cream and my mum and dad on episodes of Game of Thrones!

sugar rush,tiersattributes,tracking shothurtlingpyrotechnic Adjective pyrotechnic

1. relating to fireworks.

2 brilliant or sensational.

The service returns were like a pyrotechnic display in their dazzling brilliance.

Paul and Joe say my writing can be pyrotechnic!blisteringseeds the ideaexhalationPromethean fallsentient


dyspeptic sneermandiblesmyth,campwincingemotional wrench.you twigelementsprecipicescarnagedistinctive,


Tricky word of phrase

Can you find an image or picture which helps pin down the meaning

super-indulgentbingeinghurtlingpyrotechnicPromethean fall

sentientdyspeptic sneer

mandibles


myth,

emotional wrench.

you twigelementsprecipicescarnage


Captain America Civil War: review by Peter Bradshaw for the Guardian

Entertaining mayhem ensues when some of the Avengers reject government oversight following a botched operation

Should the Avengers be nationalised? This is the explosively controversial idea that ignites a “civil war” among their ranks in this exciting superhero extravaganza. It’s crazily surreal, engaging and funny in the best Marvel tradition, building to a whiplash-twist reveal that sports with the ever-present idea of duplicity and betrayal within the Avengers’ ranks themselves.

The innumerable civilian deaths and collateral damage that always follow the Avengers’ spectacular city-pulverising showdowns have become impossible to ignore – and now the Avengers are faced with having to submit to UN political oversight and control.

After a catastrophic Avengers action in Lagos that resulted in Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) inadvertently trashing part of a building and killing innocent people, a political summit in Vienna is convened in which the Avengers must sign away their superheroic independence. It’s an unthinkable humiliation – the superhero equivalent of the Treaty of Versailles. And some of them aren’t having it.

Captain America (Chris Evans) makes a stand for the Avengers’ autonomy. Lining up behind him are the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Scarlet Witch.

But ranged against him, deciding to go along with the new political reality, is Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), and joining him are War Machine (Don Cheadle), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Vision (Paul Bettany).


But wait. However real these divisive issues are, might they have been deliberately triggered by a sinister German agent, persuasively played by Daniel Brühl, who sets out to exploit the dangerous, destructive potential within Winter Soldier – a dark secret dating back to a 1991 Russian military experiment revealed in flashback?

And just to make things even more lively, and even more confusing, there are two late team entries – Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and also Spider-Man, in which role Tom Holland makes his bow, and they are seductively high-spirited and hilarious, their essential absurdity and gaiety an essential part of the Marvel alchemy that somehow feeds into the Avengers’ intense seriousness and idealism. The final punch-up is of course spectacular, its collisions and detonations greeted with some outrageous one-liners.

So what is the political significance of the Avengers’ civil war? Is Captain America’s team the face of the libertarian right, scorning the dead hand of big government and the nanny state? Are Iron Man’s crew the standard bearers of centrist social democracy? How strange that Captain America, a military man from the FDR era, should scorn hierarchical control. How curious that Tony Stark, that fearless entrepreneur and risk-taker, should submit to bureaucracy. And there is incidentally not much to be gained from analysing the two teams’ identity politics. The gender balance is the same in both cases, although with twice as many African-Americans, Iron Man’s team has the edge in diversity.

No, what is obvious that there really is no real ideological difference between them. Even when they are bashing and thrashing each other – this time in an environment where there will be no collateral damage – what is all too clear is that their profound love and Avenger-y fellowship is undamaged. And no one much cares for the idea of state control and those boring, besuited politicians and functionaries, here played by William Hurt and Martin Freeman.

The best scene comes in the middle where Tony Stark has to recruit Spider-Man – a long, sarcastic chat, in which Stark drolly derides Peter Parker’s arachnid “onesie”. The civil war is not one that anyone expects to be “won” in any permanent sense although the title might lead you to expect that Captain America will emerge as the most important combatant: it is, after all, supposed to be his movie. In fact, Chris Evans’s relative lack of charisma is


still a (minor) problem. He gets upstaged by Downey, and almost everyone else. But not by much. It’s a huge aspartame rush of a film: a giant irresistible snack, not nutritious, but very tasty


Captain America Civil War: review by Peter Bradshaw for the Guardian

Tricky word or phrase Definition Can you write another sentence showing you know it?

MayhemEnsuesoversightbotchednationalised?surreal, adjective: surreal

having the qualities of surrealism; bizarre.

"a surreal mix of fact and fantasy"

His humour can be surreal, especially his jokes about a duckbilled platypus!

duplicitycollateralinadvertentlyTreaty of Versailles.

The Treaty of Versailles (French: Traité de Versailles) was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

]

autonomy.


againstmakes his bow,seductivelyabsurditygaietyalchemylibertarian right,scorningnanny state?FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

commonly known as FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the President of the United States from 1933 to 1945

hierarchical control.bureaucracy.gender balanceideologicalsarcasticlack of charismaupstaged


aspartame Aspartame is an artificial, non-saccharide sweetener used as a sugar substitute in some foods and beverages. Look at the chemical structure of this naughty

product: aspartame is really bad for you!

rushirresistiblenutritious,


Tricky word Can you give the antonym; opposite word?

Give a sentence proving you understand it!

Mayhem Calm, peace, harmony.. Paul Cheetham always turns mayhem into calm.

duplicityinadvertentlyautonomy.gaietyscorninghierarchical control.

Non-hierarchical control The staff and boys decided to abolish prefects and have a school with non-hierarchical control; the result was mayhem!

bureaucracy.gender balancesarcasticlack of charisma Surfeit of charisma Muhammad Ali had a surfeit of charisma; he really was The

Greatest!upstaged

irresistiblenutritious,


Can you find an image or picture which helps pin down the meaning

Mayhemduplicityinadvertentlyautonomy.gaietyscorninghierarchical control.

UNITED KINGDOM NAVY OUTLINE STRUCTURE

bureaucracy.gender balancesarcasticlack of charismaupstaged


irresistiblenutritious,

Matthew Syed on Murray’s Victory: The Times

Murray takes giant step towards immortality

It is pointless narrowing down the virtuosity of Andy Murray to one quality, whether the speed of his movement around the court, his suppleness in the lunge, those velvet hands around the net or his consistency from the back of the court, for this is a player whose essential genius consists in variety. There is nothing the Scot does that lacks wit, intricacy and cunning.

And rarely has there been a more beautiful showcase for these virtues than on Centre Court yesterday, where he outplayed and out-thought Milos Raonic, his 6ft 5in, 25-year-old opponent from Canada, to win Wimbledon for a second time and take his grand-slam tally to three. When you consider the era that Murray has played in, and the titans of the game he has confronted, this is an


achievement of rare distinction. “I’m really proud that I managed to do it again after a lot of tough losses in the latter stages of the slams over the last couple of years,” he said afterwards.

The match was curiously lacking in tension for a Wimbledon final involving a Briton, but then perhaps most of the audience had concluded midway through the opening set, when Murray broke in the seventh game, that this was likely to go only one way. Raonic briefly threatened in the following set, before a dominant performance by Murray in the tie-break put him two up.

From there, a sense of inevitability vied with one of growing awe at the range and intelligence of Murray’s play. The Scot threatened to break in the third set, but Raonic held firm, taking it to another tie-break, although any hopes still harboured by the Canadian were extinguished as Murray took the first five points, now surfing on the euphoria of the patriotic crowd. “The support that I had throughout the two weeks, especially today, was amazing,” he said. “That really helps”.

The contrast between the two styles and philosophies was vivid throughout. Raonic had one, dominant tactic — to hit the serve as hard as possible and get to the net early — and he stuck to it rigidly, realising that he could not stay at the back of the court and survive. There was something almost mechanistic about his approach, as if he was following an algorithm, agreed in advance with John McEnroe and Carlos Moyá, his coaches. “Hit hard. Hit true. Get to the net. Repeat.”

Murray, on the other hand, was a model of adaptability and finesse. Power, to him, is only one aspect of tennis, and rarely the most important one. Again and again when Raonic came to the net Murray caressed the ball, urging it to dip to the feet of his Gulliveresque opponent, before throwing in a disguised lob, or a teasing backhand down the line, or a forehand with fizz. He also served magnificently, only being taken

Perhaps most impressively of all, he read the Raonic serve with startling comprehension, at one point in the second set knocking back a 147mph bomb from the baseline as if swatting a fly.

Raonic, to his credit, never allowed his head to drop. This is a player who has come of age at Wimbledon, his five-set victory over Roger Federer in the semi-final revealing a fierce will and underrated nerve. He didn’t just defeat a top player in that match, but a one-sided Centre Court crowd, and he was full of vim as he stepped out for the final, under grey, wispy cloud that soon gave way to sunshine. At no point did he seem overawed by the occasion.


No, Raonic’s problem was more elemental: an opponent whose game cannot be battered into submission. The more power Raonic deployed, the more Murray danced and jousted and parried and countered. At times, particularly when the Canadian started throwing down second serves in excess of 125mph, to no obvious effect, it felt almost matadorial. It is noteworthy that since losing to Raonic at Indian Wells in March 2014, Murray has lost only once in the 41 matches he has played against, bigger, taller opponents.

And so Murray, this singular, complex character from a small Scottish town, takes another step towards greatness. The spirits of Federer, Rafa Nadal and Djokovic seemed to hover over the grounds yesterday, for these figures have been as responsible as anyone for creating the player Murray has become. To play against such athletes, to lose to them, but to have the resilience to learn in the trying, has taken Murray to levels that few imagined when he arrived on the circuit, fragile of body and mind, as a teenager.

Can he take one final leap to the summit of the world game? Grounds for optimism consist in the Scot’s single-mindedness and resolve, as well as the presence of Ivan Lendl, who has had such a palpable effect since arriving for a second stint as coach. Before the final, Murray had lost four of five tie-breaks to Raonic, but his dominance yesterday provided perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the mental edge he seems to discover when Lendl is in his corner.

Grounds for pessimism, however, consist in the shape of Djokovic who, despite enduring a shock defeat by Sam Querrey here, remains the most formidable player on the planet, and is likely to stay in the game just so long as he is hunting down Federer’s grand-slam record of 17.

One senses that this already gripping rivalry is set to grow in fascination. “I don’t mind failing,” Murray said finally, as if summarising his philosophy.

“Failing’s OK, providing that you’ve given your best and put everything into it. Obviously a lot of questions would get asked of me after those losses [in grand-slam finals]. But, you know, failing’s not terrible . . . I’ve lost a lot of close ones against great players most of the time. That’s it. Just don’t be afraid of failing . . . [I have learned] from all of my losses. That’s what I’ve done throughout my career.”



Tricky word of phrase Definition Can you write another sentence showing you know it?

virtuositysupplenessconsistencyintricacytitansinevitabilityviedharbouredeuphoria Euphoria:

a feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness.

Receiving Paul’s booklet filled the whole family with euphoria.

patrioticrigidly,almost mechanisticalgorithm,finesse.Gulliveresquecomprehension,full of vimoverawed


elemental:singular,resilienceoptimismpalpablestintdominanceeloquentenduring agripping rivalry



Tricky word of phrase Find a good picture or image to illustrate these wordsvirtuosity

suppleness

intricacyInevitabilityeuphoriapatrioticrigidly,finesse.Gulliveresqueoverawedresilience


optimismdominancegripping rivalry


Tricky word Can you give the antonym; opposite word?

Give a sentence proving you understand it!

virtuosityintricacyInevitabilityeuphoria Sadness, sorrow, misery Paul’s booklet filled the house with a sense of sorrow.

After the euphoria of victory came the sadness of knowing he would have to do it all again next year against another opponent!

rigidly,finesse.overawedresilienceoptimismdominance


Please read these articles and poems over the summer and be ready to discuss them.

Dear Mr Lee U A Fanthorpe.

Dear Mr Lee (Mr Smart says it’s rude to call you Laurie, but that’s how I think of you, having lived with you really all year), Dear Mr Lee (Laurie) I just want you to know I used to hate English, and Mr Smart is roughly my least favourite person, And as for Shakespeare (we’re doing him too) I think he’s a national disaster, with all those jokes that Mr Smart has to explain why they’re jokes, and even then no one thinks they’re funny, And T. Hughes and P. Larkin and that lot in our anthology, not exactly a laugh a minute, pretty gloomy really, so that’s why I wanted to say Dear Laurie (sorry) your book’s the one that made up for the others, if you could see my copy you’d know it’s lived with me, stained with coke and kitkat and when I had a cold, and I often take you to bed with me to cheer me up so Dear Laurie, I wanted to say sorry, I didn’t want to write a character-sketch of your mother under headings, it seemed wrong somehow when you’d made her so lovely, and I didn’t much like those questions about social welfare and the rural community and the seasons as perceived by an adolescent I didn’t think you’d want your book read that way, but bits of it I know by heart, and I wish I had your uncles and your half sisters and lived in Slad, though Mr Smart says your view of the class struggle is naïve and the examiners won’t be impressed by me knowing so much by heart, they’ll be looking for terse and cogent answers to their questions, but I’m not much good at tense and cogent, I’d just like to be like you, not mind about being poor, see everything bright and strange, the way you do, and I’ve got the next one out of the Public Library, about Spain, and I asked mum about leaving to play the fiddle, but Mr Smart says Spain isn’t like that anymore, it’s all time share villas and Torremolinos, and how old were you when you became a poet? (Mr Smart says for anyone


with my punctuation to consider poetry as a career is enough to make the angels weep). Ps Dear Laurie, please don’t feel guilty for me failing the exam, it wasn’t your fault, it was mine, – and Shakespeare’s, and maybe Mr Smart’s, I still love Cider, it hasn’t made any difference.


An Irish Airman foresees his Death W B Yeats

I KNOW that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, 5My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, 10A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind 15In balance with this life, this death.

Please look at these links:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLvHTDa1fkEhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPuVbhv_bm4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPuVbhv_bm4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLvHTDa1fkE

The Soldier Rupert Brooke

IF I should die, think only this of me:That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is forever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Please look at this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7hQaoS7_u8


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7hQaoS7_u8

The Somme machineguns rattled in Middle-earth and rattle us still. As the centenary of the worst day in British military history approaches, Simon Tolkien tells Josh Glancy how the battle that remains seared in the national memory helped give birth to his grandfather’s epic The Lord of the Rings Josh Glancy The Times

For Simon Tolkien the legacy of the Somme, which began 100 years ago on July 1 and lasted nearly five months, has always been part of his family inheritance. His grandfather, JRR Tolkien, fought there and lost two of his best friends on the battlefield. Like many who experienced such horrors, his grandfather didn’t speak of them much. But it all filtered into his imagination with great effect. For Simon Tolkien the war was not just his grandfather’s experience but the basis for one of the most popular pieces of fiction ever written: The Lord of the Rings. It defines his family still.

Tolkien was 22 when the First World War broke out, looking ahead to marriage and a comfortable life as an Oxford don, burying his vast mind in Old English sagas. But in 1915, as a young man with “too much imagination and little physical courage”, he joined up. The following summer he saw action on the Somme with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, which he described as “animal horror”.

It was while convalescing in hospital after the battle that Tolkien wrote the first story in what became his Middle-earth epic. It was called The Fall of Gondolin, a tale of machinery, fire and war. Critics debate the extent to which his later work reflects the catastrophic conflicts of the 20th century, but one thing is clear: Tolkien’s war changed his mind for ever. Without the Somme there would have been no Mordor.

“The ultimate absurdity is that we’re still not sure what the outcome of this battle wasFor Simon Tolkien, a criminal barrister turned novelist, the legacy of his grandfather’s work has often been crushing. His father was Christopher Tolkien, a stern critic who edited and developed JRR’s work. Simon had his own literary aspirations, but his sense of individual identity was all but destroyed by Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the books, which turned Tolkien into a global phenomenon.


“It was like this juggernaut in our lives,” he says. “It had an effect on what I thought of myself, who I was. I wanted to be someone in my own right, to be able to look in the mirror and say: this is you.”

The films led to a falling out with Christopher, as father and son disagreed on whether the family should co-operate with Jackson or not. They spent years not speaking, communicating mostly through lawyers. In order to find his own way, Simon started writing. No Man’s Land is his fifth novel, but crucially his first about the First World War. It follows a young man who leaves Oxford and fights on the Somme; the parallels with his grandfather are clear and conscious. “I wanted to write so that I would have a sense of my own identity,” he says. “But the irony is the whole thing has been a long journey back to being comfortable with my heritage and my legacy. Now I feel comfortable with my relationship to my grandfather. It’s kind of wonderful that I’ve been able to write a book about the First World War, which is something he never did, but was so much a part of his life. I feel a sense of kinship with him having gone through that journey.”

Christopher Tolkien is 91 now and has made up with his son. “It’s wonderful for me that he’s been able to read all my books,” says Simon. “I remember sitting down outside his house in the south of France, two years back, and him saying, ‘What I really want is for you to bring to life the First World War, to write about the Somme. That’s what I really want.’”

Not everyone in Britain carries with them such a personal connection to the Somme, but when the

centenary of its fateful first day is commemorated we will all feel the weight of its legacy. Even today, as the author AP Herbert said, “every Englishman has a picture of the Somme in his mind”.

The First World War has become a byword for the futility of conflict, the pity of war. For Britain, the Battle of the Somme symbolises this futility — the Empire suffered 420,000 casualties for questionable gains on the field. That loss has a symbol too: the first day, the first moments, when the whistles blew and tens of thousands of men went over the top to their deaths.


The numbers still have the power to shock. The British Army had 57,470 casualties that day, including 19,240 killed. It was and likely always will be its darkest and bloodiest moment. Pals’ battalions drawn from mining communities and mill towns were decimated. The Newfoundland Regiment went over the top with 780 men. Only 68 appeared at roll call the next morning.

“Idealism perished on the Somme,” said the historian AJP Taylor. Others describe it as the day deference died, the end of the Victorian age, the modernist shattering of certainty and truth. It was the place where Tolkien discovered the evil that haunts The Lord of the Rings and where Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori became the old lie. If these things are true, then it was likely the whole war was responsible rather than one battle or one day. But in Britain it is the Somme we return to as the symbol of what changed and what was lost.

“Unlike the Second World War, when we talk of Stalingrad and Hiroshima, the First World War is remembered incredibly locally,” says Geoff Dyer, author of The Missing of the Somme, a book about how we remember the war.

“Each nation takes a little bit of it, each nation remembers the site of its greatest calamity. For the French it is Verdun, for the Australians and New Zealanders it is Gallipoli, for us it is the Somme. It expresses that crucial sense of appalling, catastrophic loss in miniature.”

Dyer’s book became famous because it argued that unlike other wars, the Great War was memorialised as it was happening. He analyses Laurence Binyon’s famous poem, For the Fallen. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them,” Binyon wrote. Yet these words were published in The Times in September 1914, before the fallen actually fell. The poem, which has become a staple of Remembrance Day services, was already anticipating the act of memorial.

“All around, everything about the war was to do with memory,” says Dyer. “Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, they were agonising about how it would be remembered while it was happening.”

This perhaps helps to explain why memories of the First World War, often immortalised in poetry, stay with us so closely 100 years later when all who


fought in it are dead. But why the Somme? Why that first day? Partly, of course, it is the sheer scale of the loss, the devastation wreaked on local communities by the losses of the pals’ battalions, many of which were disbanded after the Somme (or the “great f*** up” as it was called in the ranks). Partly it is the propaganda film of the battle that was watched by 20m people in Britain later that summer, connecting the home front with the battlefield.

But also the futility of the day stays with us. We think of the Second World War as “the good war”. Whatever losses Britain suffered then were necessary, lives given in a valiant cause. Similarly at Waterloo, where Wellington’s army suffered proportionally similar losses to the Somme, we do not question them in the same way because the day ended in clear victory.

We do not have a convincing story to tell ourselves about the First World War. We still argue over what caused it, why we sacrificed the flower of our youth in Flanders fields. And we certainly do not have a convincing story to tell ourselves about the Battle of the Somme or what its purpose was. Without such a story the losses will seem unbearable, the waste unimaginable.The reputation of the British Army’s commander on the Somme, General Douglas Haig, has been revived somewhat by historians in recent years. But it is still difficult to discern what his battle plan was.

“The strategy of the battle is unclear and it shifts,” says Sir Hew Strachan, professor of international relations at St Andrews University. “On the ground itself there isn’t an obvious objective. So how do you rationalise what happened?”

Strachan points out that Haig’s initial stated aim was a breakthrough. When that failed, he explained the battle in terms of attrition, that the German army suffered heavier losses. But in fact losses were broadly similar on both sides.

It was also argued that by attacking on the Somme the British were relieving the French at Verdun. But by July 1916 the French were holding fine at Verdun, their crisis had passed. “The purpose was unclear at the time and remains disputed thereafter,” says Strachan. “The ultimate absurdity is that we’re still not sure what the outcome of this battle was.”

Perhaps this is why JRR Tolkien, despite his vast literary output, never wrote directly about the First World War — because what he saw was so hard to


rationalise. Perhaps that’s why his imaginary wars have purpose — grand struggles between good and evil that must be won no matter the cost. Perhaps he was trying to prove to himself that “not all tears are an evil”.

But it is difficult to find such meaning in that first day of July 1916. The closest I have come is in the comradely pathos of an inscription at a cemetery near Mansell Copse on the Somme. Here 161 members of the Devonshire Regiment were laid to rest by their comrades, three days after the battle began. On a wooden cross they wrote: “The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.”


The Village Blacksmith UNDER a spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms 5 Are strong as iron bands. His hair is crisp, and black, and long, His face is like the tan; His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can, 10And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man. Week in, week out, from morn till night, You can hear his bellows blow; You can hear him swing his heavy sledge 15 With measured beat and slow, Like a sexton ringing the village bell, When the evening sun is low. And children coming home from school Look in at the open door; 20They love to see the flaming forge, And hear the bellows roar, And watch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor. He goes on Sunday to the church, 25 And sits among his boys; He hears the parson pray and preach, He hears his daughter's voice, Singing in the village choir, And it makes his heart rejoice. 30 It sounds to him like her mother's voice, Singing in Paradise! He needs must think of her once more, How in the grave she lies; And with his hard, rough hand he wipes 35 A tear out of his eyes. Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close; 40Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose. Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of life 45 Our fortunes must be wrought; Thus on its sounding anvil shapedEach burning deed and thought!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1807–1882


Look at these links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myBPSyyNa4k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unFABVILHmQ


Some Fun Puzzles and Interview Type Riddles etc. You don’t have to answer these but they may be fun to ask your friends and family!

1. The Double Jeopardy Doors

You are trapped in a room with two doors. One leads to certain death and the other leads to freedom. You don't know which is which. There are two robots guarding the doors. They will let you choose one door but upon doing so you must go through it. You can, however, ask one robot one question. The problem is one robot always tells the truth, the other always lies and you don't know which is which.

What is the question you ask?

2

Riddle Possible Answer?Which word in the dictionary is spelled incorrectly?If you have me, you want to share me. If you share me, you haven't got me. What am I?What gets broken without being held?Forward I am heavy, but backward I am not. What am I?He has married many women, but has never been married. Who is he?Take off my skin - I won't cry, but you will! What am I?


What invention lets you look right through a wall?What can you catch but not throw?What is at the end of a rainbow?What is as light as a feather, but even the world's strongest man couldn't hold it for more than a minute?What occurs once in every minute, twice in every moment, yet never in a thousand years?

3.

What mathematical symbol can be placed between 5 and 9, to get a number greater than 5 and smaller than 9?

4. A police officer saw a truck driver clearly going the wrong way down a one-way street, but did not try to stop him. Why not?

5 Using only addition, how do you add eight 8’s and get the number 1000?

6

There is a three digit number. The second digit is four times as big as the third digit, while the first digit is three less than the second digit. What is the number?

7There are Martians with 4 eyes, Martians with 6 eyes, Martians with 8 eyes and Martians with 12 eyes. You know that there is an equal number of each type of Martian and you also know that the total number of eyes that the Martians have between them is 5,130

How many Martians of each type have you got?

8A man goes on a sponsored walk. On the first day he covers one third of the total distance. On the second day he covers one half of the remaining distance. On the third day he covers one third of the remaining distance and on the fourth day he covers one quarter of the remaining distance.

He now has 25 miles left to go. How far has he travelled?


9If you add the age of a man to the age of his wife, the result is 91. He is now twice as old as she was when he was as old as she is now.

How old is the man and how old is his wife?

10

A father is four times as old as his son. In twenty years, he'll be twice as old. How old are they now?

11

Rearrange three golfballs so that the triangular pattern points down instead of up.

12

How many squares can you create in this figure by connecting any 4 dots (the corners of a square must lie upon a grid dot).


13

MISSING SYMBOL: Complete the square logically.

14.


https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tIgGKNi42FM/UTGxr25ncUI/AAAAAAAAF58/90J_srlf7OE/s1600/Maths-Picture-Riddle.jpg

15

In the image below, you can find four matchsticks pattern. Can you identify which of these is odd one out?

16

Can you solve below number pyramid puzzle by replacing question mark with the correct number.

168 12 14 ? 2 ? ? 2 1 ?

17

Which number should replace the question mark In The Circle Below ?


https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-io6rUJvKKL0/VwEwH6DpcRI/AAAAAAAAPd8/tOCzTrRZc8seYawj8bLvtg81fh8IYzWZw/s320/OddOneOutMatchStickPuzzle.png

18

Move 2 matchsticks to display time as 4:30

19

There are nine points as shown in the picture above. Can you connect them with four straight lines without lifting pen from a paper?

(It might look like circles in the pictures but its points)

20


https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cJrbqqINw98/UQQvs5_elKI/AAAAAAAAFfc/OUwjnhNe9oE/s1600/which-number-should-replace-the-question-mark-In-The-Circle-Below.jpg

Have a great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkTLIO2zanM

Satchmo on our Wonderful World!Enjoy!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkTLIO2zanM

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