Now that summer has finally arrived in London (and as Glastonbury has started, now the festival season is well on its way) the radio stations all seem to be playing summery songs – if you look in today’s independent and see John Walsh’s list of songs about summer, those talking about the things that make summer so exciting you’ll see they are all American. In fact he suggests the summer song is about sun, sea, surf, girls and cars and the Americans have always done that better than the British. The songs ….. ”Summer in the City”, “Surfin’ USA”, “The Boys of Summer”, “Dancing in the Street”, “Summer Breeze”, “Up On the Roof”, “Summertime Blues”, “Summer of ‘69″, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes”, not forgetting of course “Summer nights” from Grease. He struggles to find many British songs that are able to capture the feeling of the summer in the same way – a few notable exceptions being “In the Summertime” by Mungo Jerry, “Sunny Afternoon” by The Kinks, “Lazy Sunday”, complete with birdsong and church bells, by the Small Faces and summer holiday by Cliff Richard. And of course the one we British love best of all “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside”.  The kind of list John Walsh suggests is a part of it –  teenagers and cars and surf, but there is also the kind of music that is evocative of summer – what makes you feel like it’s hot and summery – for example Mas Que Nada by Sergio Mendes.  Much of this feeling will be cultural – for example the  wonderful “Soul Limbo” by Booker T and the MGs which is also the theme tune to BBC cricket and of course reminds every Englishman  of cricket and that is just the same as the summer. You can listen to lots of this music on Spotify for free  if you are in the UK Tune into the UIC radio station next Tuesday 6th July and listen to “The UIC Summer top 10″!

Today – 21st June is the summer solstice. That is the longest day in the UK when the sun rises at 4.42 and sets at 9.20 – and that’s an incredible 17 hours of daylight. But a little depressingly although the summer is really just about to start (it runs from 1 June to 31 August). Some people use the solstice as the first day of summer but we prefer using the months to indicate the seasons. There are celebrations all over the world on midsummer day – in some northern European countries it is more spectacular since it never gets dark there at this time of the year. Perhaps the biggest celebrations in the UK will be in Stonehenge – English Heritage has run a “Managed Open Access” to Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice celebrations. For many years Stonehenge was open to the public but became a huge attraction for all sorts of new-age enthusiasts, witches, druids and hippies (who used to have music festivals there)  and so in the 1970s the owners of Stonehenge – English Heritage fenced it off and made it more difficult (and expensive) to go there. However they do recognise the Druidic religions and allow access at this time of the year – one of the most important to these religions. Stonehenge is one of the most popular trips UIC runs for students on the social programme. What do we know about it? Speculation on the reason it was built range from human sacrifice to astronomy. Stonehenge was constructed in three phases, it has been estimated that the three phases of the construction required more than thirty million hours of labour. It is estimated the stones were put together in 3100 BC – so about 5000 years ago. This part of England is fascinating – and very ancient. If you are a visitor to the UK do try to get to visit here. About 25 miles from Stonehenge is Avebury – another very ancient stone circle, and Glastonbury (famous for the music festival and also the ‘magic’ ) is also very near.

Here is a film of some hippies at Stonehenge!

If you need information on how to get here, just pop into the UIC school office and ask one of us.

One of the biggest tennis tournaments in the world starts tomorrow. Along with France, the US and Australia, Wimbledon is one of the important prizes to win in tennis, and still one of the very few major tournaments played on grass courts. It used to be the case that rain stopped play at Wimbledon frequently, but with the new roof over the main court now, this is no longer a problem – so for the next 2 weeks (finals on Sunday 4th July) you can see some of the bets tennis in the world. There hasn’t been a British men winner since the 1930s and you will read plenty on this in the newspapers over the coming days. A British woman won the singles title in 1977 – but since then NOTHING!  You can go and watch the games easily enough – just go along in the evening and queue up. There are a few tickets available for all the courts each day but you will have to spend days queuing up to stand a chance of getting a ticket. Besides the tennis, Wimbledon is famous for being one of the great British sporting traditions (along with Ascot, the cup final and so on) and this means for many people it’s a bit of a day out – dress up, eat strawberries and cream and drink champagne. Oh, and watch the tennis if you like! If you do want to go it’s easiest to go to Wimbledon station (on both the underground and main train lines) and from there you can catch a local bus – it is very well signposted. UIC will be organising a trip there – watch out for information at the school.

There seems to be general agreement that Roger Federer is the best tennis player ever – here’s a short movie showing some of his best moves!

The tennis will be on the TV every day, fighting for space with the world cup – a sporting dilemma if ever there was one – but even if England are knocked out of the World Cup there may still be a little interest in the only British player likely to do anything at all – Andy Murray.

London is without doubt the biggest melting pot in the UK – people for all around the world live here and have been coming here for hundreds of years. If you look even further back then there has been virtually constant immigration to London – of course one of the best known groups of immigrants were the Romans over 2000 years ago! There are several legacies of this movement of people – the  multiculturalism we enjoy in London – a huge variety of restaurants, music, fashion, religions for example and also a huge variety of languages spoken. We know that students want to come to the UK to study English (and many of them want to come to London) and so this is an additional source of international visitors coming here and adding to the general colour of London. You might think the most widely spoken languages are European, but in a recent survey of 850,000 children – asking what the first language they spoke at home was – the most commonly spoken language were: English (71%), Bengali & Silheti (5%), Panjabi (3.5%), Gujerati (3%),   Hindi/Urdu (3%), Turkish (2%), Arabic (1%). Greek, Spanish, French and Portuguese are the most widely spoken European languages and all about the same numbers – under 1% each. So, you can assume that around 30% of the population in London doesn’t speak English at home, and this alongside another statistic – that around 10% of school children don’t have English as their first language – surely must give London the title of ‘most diverse city on the planet’.

In UIC you will find students from over 50 different countries every year – all here to learn English and all here to add colour to the city – not to mention bringing millions and millions of pounds into the local economy – whether from their school fees, the accommodation fees or just the money they spend day to day on ravel, food, newspapers and so on. These students are not only valuable culturally, but economically and hopefully one day the government will recognise this!