Mock 1 — Reading

Eight days out from London by train

A · Brighton — one hour from Victoria. The beach is pebbles, not sand, but the pier has rides and games, and the Lanes behind it are full of small shops and cafés. Very busy at weekends.

B · Windsor — fifty minutes. The castle takes most of a day if you do it properly, and the Great Park beside it is a long walk with wonderful views. Check the opening days in winter.

C · Kew Gardens — thirty minutes from Waterloo. Enormous glasshouses full of plants from every part of the world, wide flat paths, benches everywhere and a good café. Bring a picnic; you will want the whole day.

D · Whitstable — an hour and twenty minutes. A small fishing town on the Kent coast, famous for its oysters and the fish restaurants right on the pebble beach. Quiet in the week, and not cheap.

E · Cambridge — fifty minutes from King's Cross. Old colleges you can walk through, a river with boats to hire, and several free museums. Flat, so easy on foot or by bicycle.

F · Bath — an hour and a half from Paddington. The Roman baths are two thousand years old and still full of hot water; book your ticket online, as the queue can be an hour. The city is on a hill and has a great many steps.

G · Greenwich — twenty minutes from London Bridge. Stand on the line where time begins, see the famous old sailing ship, and climb the hill in the park for a view of the whole city. You can see it all in a couple of hours.

H · Hastings — an hour and forty minutes. An old town, a castle on the cliff, and a long sandy beach when the tide is out. Fish and chips on the front cost less than a London sandwich, and children travel half price on the train.

The youngest ringer in the tower

Every Sunday morning at half past nine, while most of her friends are still asleep, Ellie Marsh climbs sixty-two stone steps to a small room at the top of a church tower in Somerset. She is fifteen, and she has been ringing the church bells for three years — since a Saturday when she followed the sound up the stairs to find out where it was coming from, and was handed a rope before she could leave.

Ringing bells this way is something Britain does that almost nowhere else does. In most countries a bell is struck, or swung a little; in Britain the bells are turned through a full circle, mouth up to mouth up, by a person on the end of a rope. They are heavy — the largest in Ellie's tower weighs more than a small car — and the ringer does not control it so much as agree with it. “The first thing they teach you is not to hold on,” she says. “If the bell wants the rope, you let it go.”

The sound people hear from outside is not a tune. It is a pattern: six bells ringing in an order that changes slightly every time, so that no two rows are the same for as long as the ringers can keep it up — sometimes an hour, sometimes three. There is no music to read, because there is no time to read it. The ringers memorise the pattern and count. “You're doing maths standing up,” Ellie says. “That's the bit that got me. I'm not musical at all.”

Most ringers are over sixty, and towers across the country are going quiet because nobody young is coming up the stairs. Ellie's tower was down to five ringers when she arrived; it needs six. She has since brought two friends, one of whom stayed. “I don't tell people it's fun, because they won't believe me,” she says. “I tell them it's the only thing I do where my phone is in a box downstairs and I don't think about it once.”

She has no plans to stop. Universities have towers too, and ringers are welcomed wherever they go, which she says is the real reason she keeps climbing the stairs: “You walk into a tower in a town you've never been to, you say you ring, and you've got twelve friends.”

Why the British drive on the left

Visitors who hire a car in Britain discover the problem at the first roundabout. 16 ______ The honest answer is that the British never changed, and most of the world did.

In the days of horses, a rider kept to the left so that the right hand — the sword hand — was nearer to anyone coming the other way. 17 ______ Britain simply wrote that habit into law in 1835.

The change elsewhere came from France. Before the Revolution, the rich rode on the left and the poor walked on the right; afterwards, keeping right became a way of showing you were nobody special. 18 ______ Wherever his armies went, the traffic moved to the right and stayed there.

The United States went right for a different reason: huge wagons pulled by teams of horses, with the driver sitting on the left-hand horse so that he could see the gap between his wagon and the one he was passing. 19 ______ Two continents had moved to the right, for two different reasons, and Britain, an island, felt neither.

So the British side of the road is not a decision anybody made. 20 ______ Around a third of the world drives the same way, most of it places that Britain once ruled, and none of them show any sign of changing.

Bank holidays

Eight times a year, most people in Britain get a day off work at the same time. These are the bank holidays, and they nearly always 21 ______ on a Monday, so that the weekend becomes three days long. The name goes back to 1871, when a law closed the banks on certain days, and everybody else 22 ______ advantage of it.

What people do with the day depends on the weather, which is why so many bank holidays are 23 ______ in a traffic jam on the way to the coast. Everybody has the same idea at the same time. The roads to the sea are full by ten, the car parks by eleven, and by lunchtime the rain has usually 24 ______ in.

Still, nobody suggests giving them up. A bank holiday is one of the few things the whole country does together, and people 25 ______ forward to the next one from the moment the last one ends. The most popular is the one at the end of August — the last long weekend before the schools go back and the long summer evenings 26 ______ to an end.

A message from Nila to the group

Hi everyone,

Saturday is still on! We're meeting at the park gates at twelve. The forecast says rain in the morning, 27 ______ it should be dry by twelve, so bring something to sit on anyway. Tom is bringing the football and I'm 28 ______ charge of the food — tell me by Friday if there's anything you can't eat.

If it's still raining at twelve, we'll go to my house instead, 29 ______ is only five minutes away. My mum says she doesn't mind 30 ______ long as we take our shoes off.

Don't forget the bus back is 31 ______ half past five — the later one doesn't run 32 ______ Saturdays.

See you all there!
Nila