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The men who live in the country in Britain like to live quietly. They walk slowly, talk slowly and sit in the sun a lot. But the women are always vety busy: while their husbands are working, they look after their gardens, and they make jam and cakes and give them to their neighbours.
The women in the small village always want to know what everybody in the village doing. In the morning, they go to the main street to do their shopping. There's often only one shop in the street - the village stores, where you can buy everything. They stand outside the stores and talk about everything that's happened in the village in the last twenty-four hours. They learn who's ill, who's been rude to the doctor, who's taken Mrs. Brown's daughter to the cinema, who's had a letter from London... Then they go home and tell their husbands, who often don't want to know!
A lot of villages have a club for women, the Women's Intitute, where people come to speak about "How to make your home prettier" or "Forty happy years with my husband". For a woman, it's very important to show the best flowers or to make the best cake at the Women's Institute: everything that happens there is told in the village newspapers.
The men of the village meet in the village pub in the evenings and drink beer together. But they don't talk much: when the British farm worker's drinking his beer, he likes to sit and think.
The most important person in the village is usually the vicar. He likes to be friendly with everyone; and he looks after the Women's Institute and all the other clubs. Every year, he arranges the village fete. This is the most exciting thing that happens. For weeks, women make cakes and jam and knit jerseys so that they can sell them at the fete. Then tents are put up in the middle of the village. Each woman has a tent, and tries to sell more than everybody else. There are usually games for children, a fortune-teller and a tent where they serve tea. All the money that's made at the fete pays for new windows, or for a new roof for the church.
Near most villages, there's a big house where the most important family of the village has lived for five hundred years. The family's often rather poor now, but they don't like the people in the village to know. The husband's usually a man who was once in the Army: he tells everyone that Britain's become very weak, and that young people don't know how they should behave. And he writes letters to the papers about these things.