Listen to me telling this classic Christmas ghost story – “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. I have read this story on the podcast before (in episode 320) but it’s a good one so let’s do it again, shall we? 🎅
Tag Archives: story
854. The Invitation (Learn English with a Short Story)
🎧 Learn English with a short story. 🗣 Listen & repeat after me if you’d like to practise your pronunciation. 💬 Learn some vocabulary in the second half of the video. 📄 I found this story in answer to a post on Quora.com asking about true scary stories. I thought I could use it to help you learn English. Can you understand the story, and predict the twist at the end?
Story Script
The Invitation
About 7 years ago I got an invitation to attend a dinner party at my cousin’s house. I have a pretty large family and I had never actually seen this particular cousin before. I had only ever spoken to him on the phone. I was surprised that his family unexpectedly invited me over, but I was curious to finally meet them.
The invitation had an address that I didn’t know and the GPS was unfamiliar with it too. It was in one of those areas where Google Maps doesn’t work properly because of poor phone reception,
so I had to use an old fashioned paper map. I marked the location on the map, tried to get a sense of where I was headed, and set off in my car.
As I was driving I started to notice how far I’d travelled into the countryside, away from civilization. I saw trees, farms and fields passing by. Just trees, farms, and fields, and more trees, more farms and more fields.
“Where the hell am I going?” I thought to myself. I’d never ventured out so far in that direction before.
I drove for quite a long time, trying to locate the address I had marked on the map.
The thing is, in this area, a lot of the roads don’t have names, or the names aren’t clearly marked by road signs. I just had to try to match the layout of the streets, to the layout I could see on the map.
I finally found a place at a location that looked like the one I had noted on my map. I was pretty sure this was the right spot, so I parked and got out of the car.
Approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked. It was completely covered in leaves, branches and overgrown trees.
“This can’t be it.” I said to myself.
But as soon as I walked onto the rocky driveway my aunt and uncle came out to greet me. They seemed excited and welcoming.
“Hello! Hello! Come in! Come in!” they said, beckoning me inside.
Walking into the house, I asked where my cousin was. Answering immediately one of them said, “Oh, he just went to run a few errands. He should be back later.”
I waited in their kitchen and we spent a couple of hours talking about my mother and my family. My aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast that I finished off in minutes.
After dinner we played an enduring game of Uno. It was surprisingly fun and competitive. My aunt in particular seemed delighted to be playing.
When we finished the game of Uno it was almost dark and there was still no sign of my cousin. My aunt and uncle assured me that he’d be back any time soon. Despite what they said, I decided that I had to leave.
It was almost dark outside and I knew it would be a nightmare to find my way out of this dreadful place after sunset, with no streetlights or road signs. As my GPS just wasn’t working, I asked my aunt and uncle the most efficient way to get to the highway.
They gave me a puzzled look.
“But, we thought you were staying the night?” they said.
I told them I couldn’t because I had work the next day and couldn’t afford to miss another day. “It’s much better if you leave tomorrow morning. Trust us. You’ll get lost” they said.
I shrugged it off and told them not to worry,
“Don’t worry. I’ve got a pretty good sense of direction. I could find my way out of the Sahara desert.” I told them.
Looking aggravated, they strongly advised me to stay the night for my own sake. Their body language was weird too as they became more serious and insistent. My uncle stood shaking his head, and my aunt began to move about the place, picking up a set of keys to unlock what I assume was a spare bedroom.
At this point I was getting annoyed and irritable. I sighed, “Fine I’ll stay the night then, but I have to get up very early for work.” I said. Both of them seemed strangely ecstatic that I was staying the night.
As soon as they went out of the room to get bed sheets and pillows,
I ran out of the door, got in my car and hastily pulled away. I know it was rude, but I suddenly felt the urge to get out of there, quickly.
It seemed to take me ages, but I finally found my way back to the main highway and drove back through the night, wondering why my cousin had never turned up.
I got home several hours later than I expected. It was after midnight and I didn’t want to wake my parents up. Climbing over my fence and entering the back door, I noticed that the kitchen lights were on.
As soon as I took my first step through the door, I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient.
“Where have you been?”
She asked.
“I was at aunt Debra’s. I told you.”
I replied.
“Then why did she call saying you never arrived?”
To this day, I still have no idea who I visited.
833. Text Adventure Story: Lemon Simulator (by Daniel Champion)
Join me as I read through a bizarre online game. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a lemon? No? Well, neither had I, until I played this game. Can I escape the kitchen, become human again and avoid being chopped up and turned into a juice! Watch out for some descriptive language and some funny moments along the way! Story by Daniel Champion on www.textadventures.co.uk
🍋 Play “Lemon Simulator” by Daniel Champion and read the text https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/6q7gsnm4oeyqsmou1artbw/lemon-simulator-2014
832. Sherlock Holmes: The Red-headed League (Learn English with a Short Story)
Let me read you a classic Sherlock Holmes detective story, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ll read the original text and stop regularly in order to explain what is happening.
📄 DOWNLOAD THE PDF TRANSCRIPT 👇
817. Parson’s Pleasure by Roald Dahl (Learn English with a Short Story)
Learn English with another short story. This time it’s Parson’s Pleasure by Roald Dahl, which is an intriguing tale of a dodgy antiques dealer, with a nasty twist at the end. Learn vocabulary while you enjoy a fascinating story.
808. James Harris returns to talk about his book 📖🗣
James Harris is a writer, comedian, English teacher and language learner (French, German, Chinese) from England. In this funny chat, we talk about learning Chinese, being married to a Chinese woman and his semi-autobiographical book, “Midlands” which tells several funny and touching stories about two ex-pats living in Germany; Stuart, who is a stand-up comedian trying to understand the Germans, and Doug who gets involved in a love affair. James reads several passages from the book during the episode.
👉 Get James’ book ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Midlands-James-Harris/dp/B0B38CX11P
👉 Sign up to James’ email newsletter “Stiff Upper Quip” for regular short articles in English & more https://stiffupperquip.substack.com/
👇 Listen to James’ first episode on LEP
Extracts from “Midlands” by James Harris 📖
From Chapter 2
Stuart describes his early days in Germany, learning German.
Then a chance meeting in a pub had earned him an invitation to Berlin. Laura, Danish and short, was staying there for the summer, rummaging around in the archives for information about a particular Jewish family who had gone on to achieve cultural success in post-war Denmark;
Laura, a snub-nosed Danish girl with glasses who loved Israel and wheat beer. Stuart didn’t care much about her interests but did enjoy spending the days reading on her balcony and socializing with university friends at night;
by the end of the summer his hair had lengthened and his German increased fifty-fold, meaning he now knew about a hundred words. ‘Hallo!’ he would say, then ‘Weltschmerz’ and following a further pause ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ saying a final farewell to people he would see again the next day.
He also hadn’t yet learnt to ask whether something was sugar or salt, leading to an evening eating some very sweet chips. But even speechless he wasn’t, at last, uneasy in Berlin – it seemed to him a gentle city, where the trains slid in and out and the open spaces pacified tourists drunker and rowdier elsewhere.
It was like the Germans had become one of the peaceful races in Star Trek, the ones introduced by an insert screen of their orderly, verdant planet, Bajorans, say, or some other species permanently threatened by obliteration; and what a change after the tiny cubicles and traffic-jam living of the English, who could only ever be the Borg.
Surrounded by pacifists, Stuart revelled in the license of Englishness, his ability to voice the odd mildly aggressive opinion or wildly over-celebrate during that summer’s football tournament, until England lost. He swam in lakes, and bought a bicycle, and gradually stopped thinking of England and the ashes it had fed him.
In Oxford, where he had been President of the University sketch revue, people had printed gossip about him in the student newspapers, asked him to leave parties, dealt with him as the man who had committed that deepest and most unforgivable of Oxford crimes: failure.
He had failed, as a comedian and a young man, and now publicly; his country had rejected him. He had been humiliated in front of an audience of his contemporaries and sent into an internal exile.
Afterwards, many of these young dilettantes, at the time apparently picturing future lives as bereft of unforeseen distress as possible, lives composed of simply an endless procession of success, successes occurring within a network of contacts which they had built up at University and which would continue to provide them with unstinting support throughout their adult lives, never violating the simple and essential principle that all was permissible as long as it did well – did not want his name on their social CV.
From Chapter 14
Stuart is on-stage doing stand up in Germany.
‘Don’t you sometimes get the feeling,’ said Stuart, years before on the stage in Heidelberg, ‘that if Barack Obama had been German it wouldn’t have been “Yes We Can” but ”Nein das geht nicht”? No you can’t.
‘Everyone would have been chanting it – No you can’t! No you can’t! Of course in this version Obama would not have been black.’
Stuart was closing in on the kill. ‘And this very lack of optimism,’ he said, treading across the stage, limbering, into the really good stuff now, ‘is actually built into the German language itself.
Like for example, when you’re really happy in English, you say “I’m on Cloud Nine.” But in Germany you say, “I’m on Cloud Seven.”
Does this mean that even in their happiest moments the Germans are two clouds less happy than English-speaking people?’
And after developing that bit, which meant moving into a depiction of an exemplary German, Hannes, in his German heaven, with an allotment, board games, juice and an Autobahn heading directly to Mallorca, he noting, somewhat wistfully, the celebratory Anglophones on Cloud Nine who were dancing to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, which was an excuse to sing it, following which they – the Anglophones – called down to Cloud Eight “Hey Hannes man! Come and join us here on Cloud Nine” and Hannes replying “No thank you. Everything on Cloud Seven is perfectly satisfactory” then moving on to speculation as to the occupants of the other clouds, the French on Cloud Eight living it up, their motor scooters floating off the cloud and down to Cloud Zero where the Greeks were and below them the Cypriots who’d had to sell the cloud, and were just falling – after all these and other jokes, Stuart had them where he wanted them.
‘Isn’t it funny that, since the Second World War, the Germans have been like’, change voice, German accent, ‘”We Germans. We have done so many things wrong and there is no way we can ever put them right.”
And now Greece is like,’ pause, turn of the head, “Well, actually…”’
They laughed, and laughed, and laughed. They got it.
👇 Follow James on Twitter
804. The Missing Masaccio (Learn English with a Text Adventure Story) by Peter Carlson
The third (and final) adventure in this series of mini-mysteries on LEP. Can I improve my detective skills to work out the disappearance of a priceless painting and a series of gruesome murders? Story by Peter Carlson and available on textadventures.co.uk
👉 Play text game “Victorian Detective Interlude” on textadventures.co.uk
👉 Part 1 – The Unopened Safe
👉 Part 2 – The Wraith
Sorry for mispronouncing “Masaccio” in this episode! 🇮🇹
803. The Wraith (Learn English with a Text Adventure Story) by Peter Carlson
The second in a trilogy of text adventure stories by Peter Carlson. In this one we are chasing a ghostly serial killer with a few tricks up his sleeve. Do I have the detective skills to solve the mystery and avoid certain death?
Click here to play “Victorian Detective Interlude” on textadventures.co.uk
👉 Part 1 – The Unopened Safe
👉 Part 3 – The Missing Masaccio
802. The Unopened Safe (Learn English with a Text Adventure Story) by Peter Carlson
Let’s do another text adventure mystery story by Peter Carlson. Listen to me read the story and make choices to solve the mystery. You can read the story with me (link below) or do the game yourself later. This is the first in a series of 3 stories from Peter’s “Victorian Detective Interlude” game on textadventures.co.uk
Click here to play Victorian Detective Interlude by Peter Carlson on textadventures.co.uk
👉 Part 2 – The Wraith
👉 Part 3 – The Missing Masaccio
A message from Luke – 2022, A Year in Podcasting
Hello website visitors! I hope you’re doing ok. Did you have a good Christmas (if you celebrate it)?
These three “Victorian Detective Interlude” episodes will be the last episodes of 2022. What a year it’s been! For me, the year started in our new apartment, and everything was a disorganised mess! I had no pod-room where I could record episodes in peace, and our apartment was so noisy that I even had to record a podcast outside in the street. I talked about it in episode 759. Then I managed to set up my new studio/office in a tiny room in a nearby building. I was quite proud of myself because I put up all the shelves (more difficult than you might think!), painted the room, fitted a desk, procured a free office chair and then carried all my books, equipment and other stuff to the room (up 6 flights of stairs, no less). I talked about all that “DIY” in episode 757. After a looooong time the room finally got electricity and an internet connection, I got a new computer (the old one was kaput) and was able to get back to normal podcasting.
Oh yes, then I changed podcast host in June and everything got incredibly complicated again, especially for premium subscribers! But thankfully we all survived all the stress and I was able to record some episodes that I am very happy with, and LEP Premium continued on Acast+ with more and more new episodes.
If you have recently subscribed to LEP Premium – www.teacherluke.co.uk/premium
The best way to use LEP Premium is to add the episodes to a normal podcast app on your phone (not the LEP App, it’s not updating any more 😢, and not Spotify because it isn’t “normal”). Read this page for some important information to help you get started https://teacherluke.co.uk/premium/how-to-add-lep-premium-to-a-podcast-app-on-your-phone-with-acast/