Flashback to Grammar 1. Tenses. The Subjunctive Mood
Open the brackets using the correct tense and mood form of the verb
The Noble Art of the Obsessive Hobby
Traditionally, hobbies ______ (1 mean) to keep you out of trouble, to make harmless work for idle hands, but sometimes odd pastimes have undesirable outcomes. Psychologists warn: When a man’s Hobby-Horse ______ (2 grow) headstrong – farewell cool reason and fair discretion!
These cautionary words on the dangers of hobbies ______ (3 reaffirm) last week, when a Swedish man _______ (4 arrest) for indulging in his rather singular pastime – he ______ (5 try) to start a nuclear reaction in his kitchen for a while. Richard Handl sounded as if he ______ (6 be) absolutely sure that it ______ (7 be) possible to split atoms at home”.
To that end he ______ (8 gather) up small stores of radioactive material; his regularly updated blog ______ (9 contain) a photograph of the “meltdown” he ______ (10 create) on his hob.
In a rare moment of cool reason and fair discretion, Handl realized it ______ (11 be) time he ______ (12 ring) up the Swedish Radiation Authority to check if his project ______ (13 be) illegal. Shortly afterwards, the police ______ (14 turn) up. Naturally, now he wishes he ______ (15 never / try) it.
Then again, but for strange and private passions some great things never ______ (16 come). Many 19th-century scientists and inventors ______ (17 be) essentially hobbyists – “scientist” ______ (18 not / be) really a job in those days. How much of Charles Darwin’s work – a lifetime of collecting, cataloguing and obsessing – ______ (19 dismiss) as a pointless hobby if it _______ (20 apply) to some less well-directed end? Is it the object of one’s obsession that ______
(21 make) a hobby weird, or the relentless way one ______ (22 pursue) it? If you ______ (23 mess) about with fissile material in your kitchen, then the answer is clearly both, but it looks as if the line ______ (24 not / be) always easy to draw. Perhaps the best way to judge if your hobby is weird is to ask yourself whether you would feel comfortable if you ______ (25 list) it in the “other interests” section of your CV.
There ______ (26 be), of course, something perversely noble in a truly original hobby, in a single-minded, out-of-hours devotion to something that no one else is remotely interested in. Nothing is more irritating than when an unattractive and long-nursed hobby – playing the ukulele, say, or arson – suddenly ______
(27 become) fashionable. The great trick in life, of course, is to make your hobby your job, but even in those rare cases another hobby ______ probably (28 rise) up to claim your free time. I ______ (29 speak) as someone who is lucky enough to write for a living, and I ______ (30 sit) here in front of my computer with a banjo on my knee.
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(The Guardian, August 2011)
Reading 2. His Afterhours
(after “Saturday” by Ian McEwan)
Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. He doesn’t feel tired, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. In fact, he’s alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated.
A habitual observer of his own moods, Perowne wonders about this sustained, distorting euphoria. Perhaps down at the molecular level there’s been a chemical accident while he slept; or it’s the prospect of a Saturday, or the paradoxical consequence of extreme tiredness. It’s true, he finished the week in a state of unusual depletion.
He came home to an empty house, and lay in the bath with a book, content to be talking to no one. It was his literate, too literate daughter Daisy who sent the biography of Darwin which in turn has something to do with a Conrad novel she wants him to read and which he has yet to start. For some years now she’s been addressing what she believes is his astounding ignorance, guiding his literary education, scolding him for poor taste and insensitivity. She has a point - straight from school to medical school to the slavish hours of a junior doctor, then the total absorption of neurosurgery training spliced with committed fatherhood - for fifteen years he barely touched a non-medical book at all. On the other hand, he thinks he’s seen enough death, fear, courage and suffering to supply half a dozen literatures. Still, he submits to her reading lists – they’re his means of remaining in touch as she grows away from her family into unknowable womanhood in a suburb of Paris; tonight she’ll be home for the first time in six months - another cause for euphoria.
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He was behind with his assignments from Daisy. Controlling a fresh input of hot water, he blearily read an account of Darwin’s dash to complete The Origin of Species, and a summary of the concluding pages.At times this biography made himcomfortably nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionateEngland; at others he was faintly depressed by the way awhole life could be contained by a few hundred pages - bottled,like homemade chutney. And by how easily an existence,its ambitions, networks of family and friends, all itscherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish.
Afterwards, he stretched out on the bed to consider his supper, and remembered nothing more. Forty-eight years old, profoundly asleep at nine thirty on a Friday night - this is modern professional life. He works hard, everyone around him works hard, and this week he’s been pushed harder by a flu outbreak among the hospital staff - his operating list has been twice the usual length.
Arriving on the first floor, he pauses outside the library, the most imposing room in the house, momentarily drawn by the way sunshine, filtering through the tall gauzy oatmeal drapes, washes the room in a serious, brown and bookish light. The collection was put together by his mother-in-law. Henry never imagined he would end up living in the sort of house that had a library. It’s an ambition of his to spend whole weekends in there, stretched out on one of the sofas, pot of coffee at his side, reading some world-rank masterpiece or other, perhaps in translation. He has no particular book in mind. He thinks it would be no bad thing to understand what’s meant, what Daisy means, by literary genius.
But his free time is always fragmented, not only by errands and family obligations and sports, but by the restlessness that comes with these weekly islands of freedom. He doesn’t want to spend his days off lying, or even sitting, down. Nor does he really want to be a spectator of other lives, of imaginary lives - even though these past hours he’s put in an unusual number of minutes gazing from the bedroom window. And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. The times are strange enough. Why make things up? He doesn’t seem to have the dedication to read many books all the way through. Only at work is he single-minded; at leisure, he’s too impatient. He’s surprised by what people say they achieve in their spare time, putting in four or five hours a day in front of the TV to keep the national averages up.
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In fact, under Daisy’s direction, Henry has read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.
So far, Daisy’s reading lists have persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling and hit-and-miss to inspire uncomplicated wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved. Perhaps only music has such purity. He likes music in the operating theatre when he’s working, mostly piano works by Bach, especially the keyboard music. In a really good mood he’ll go for the looser interpretations of Glenn Gould. And then there are the usual suspects - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. His jazz idols, Evans, Davis, Coltrane. Cezanne, among various painters, certain cathedrals Henry has visited on holidays. Beyond the arts, his list of sublime achievement would include Einstein’s General Theory, whose mathematics he briefly grasped in his early twenties. He should make that list, he decides as he descends the broad stone stairs to the ground floor to the kitchen, though he knows he never will. Work that you cannot begin to imagine achieving yourself, that displays a ruthless, nearly inhuman element of self-enclosed perfection - this is his idea of genius. This notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t ‘live’ without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof.
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Here in the cavernous basement kitchen at 3.55 a.m., in a single pool of light, as though on stage, is Theo Perowne, eighteen years old, his formal education already long behind him, reclining on a tilted back kitchen chair, his legs in tight black jeans, his feet in boots of soft black leather crossed on the edge of the table.
Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician. How have he and Rosalind, such dutiful, conventional types, given rise to such a free spirit? One who dresses, with a certain irony, in the style of the bohemian fifties, who won’t read books or let himself be persuaded to stay on at school, who’s rarely out of bed before lunchtime, whose passion is for mastery in all the nuances of the tradition, Delta, Chicago, Mississippi, for certain licks that contain for him the key to all mysteries, and for the success of his band.
It’s true that on a body-surfing holiday in Pembrokeshire when Theo was nine, Henry showed him three simple chords on someone’s guitar and how the blues worked. That was just one thing along with the Frisbee throwing, grass skiing, quad biking, paintballing, stone skipping and in-line skating. He worked seriously on his children’s leisure back then. He even broke an arm keeping up on the skates. But he never could have guessed those three chords would become the basis of his son’s professional life.
Theo’s guitar pierces him because it also carries a reprimand, a reminder of buried dissatisfaction in his own life, of the missing element. There’s nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he’s denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs. There has to be more to life than merely saving lives. The discipline and responsibility of a medical career, compounded by starting a family in his mid-twenties - and over much of it, a veil of fatigue; he’s still young enough to yearn for the unpredictable and unrestrained, and old enough to know the chances are narrowing. Theo’s playing carries this burden of regret into his father’s heart. It is, after all, the blues.
He goes to the dressing room, to the corner where he stores his sports gear. These are the small pleasures at the start of a Saturday morning - the promise of coffee, and this faded squash kit. Daisy, a neat dresser, fondly calls it his scarecrow outfit. Over a grey T-shirt he puts on an old cashmere jumper with moth-holes across the chest. The white socks of prickly stretch towelling with yellow and pink bands at the top have something of the nursery about them. Unboxing them releases a homely aroma of the laundry. The squash shoes have a sharp smell, blending the synthetic with the animal, that reminds him of the court, the clean white walls and red lines, the unarguable rules of gladiatorial combat, and the score.
As he bends to tie his laces, he feels a sharp pain in his knees. It’s pointless holding out until he’s fifty. He’ll give himself six more months of squash and one last London Marathon. Will he be able to bear it, having these pastimes only in his past?
Reading Comprehension Check
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