English Speaking Club Aarbergen

Image Credit: Anrie, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons This recipe makes about 70 rusks (in the Holmes household, that's enough for about a week!) Ingredients 1kg self-raising flour. 5ml salt. 10ml baking powder. 250g sugar. 40ml Aniseed. 350g butter (at room temperature). 2 large eggs. 500ml buttermilk. Method Preheat overn to 180°C. Grease a large baking pan. Sift the flour; salt; baking powder and sugar together in a large bowl and mix in the aniseed. Rub the biutter into the dry ingredients. Mix the eggs and buttermilk together in a seperate bowl.  Add the egg-buttermik mix to the dry ingredients and cut in with a blunt knife to make a dough. Knead lightly to make sure all the ingredients and mixeed well. Press the dough into the baking pan. Place in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes. Take out after 30 minutes, allow to cool and cut into ca. 2 cm thick slices. Spread the slices evenly on two large oven trays wit...

The 1975 Queen hit Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the most famously ambiguous and debated songs in music history. Freddie Mercury himself famously refused to explain its meaning, often saying it was "just about relationships" with "a bit of nonsense in the middle," and that listeners should interpret it for themselves. Despite this, many interpretations have emerged over the years, with the most widely accepted revolving around Freddie Mercury's personal struggles, identity, and coming to terms with his sexuality. In terms of composition, the song can be broken into five sections: an intro; a ballad; an opera a hard rock section followed by an outtro in the same style as the intro. If you are interested in music, may I suggest watching this video which goes into the technical details of the song. Intro "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?": This sets the stage for a journey of self-discovery and confusion. It suggests a feeling of being caught b...

Yesteray Yesterday is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was first released on the album Help! in August 1965, except in the United States, where it was issued as a single in September of that year. The song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. It subsequently appeared on the UK EP Yesterday in March 1966 and made its US album debut on Yesterday and Today, in June 1966. McCartney's vocal and acoustic guitar, together with a string quartet, was essentially the band's first solo performance. It remains popular today and, with 2200 cover versions, is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. It was also was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners. The song was also voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame....

Ronald Reagan [Billy Hathorn, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons] Being somewhat of a fan of public speaking - though I'm not very good at it myself - I thought I would look at the inaugration speeches of Ronald Reagan (1981) and Donald Trump (2025). In my opinion , President Reagan was the last US President who as not only a statesman but also of a gentlemanly bearing. I however, do not care much about politics, even less about US politics - especially in the current day. So to get a more objective comparison between the two speeches, I employed Google Gemini (AI). I started by asking Gemini to analyse and compare the vocabulary and writing style of both speeches. This was its response: Based on the provided sources, we can analyse and compare the vocabulary and writing style of the two inaugural addresses. Vocabulary and Writing Style in Ronald Reagan's 1981 Address Ronald Reagan's 1981 Inaugural Address employs a relatively formal and measured vocabulary while remaining accessi...