TED vovabulary p.6

-eat up
A lot of people eat up all of the hollywood love stories and believe that it is exactly what happens in the real life.

-distorting
Sometimes I don't realise how many informations I received  in the past are distorted now.

-stuck in
Very often when I have something difficult to do I'm stuck in a very pesimistic way of thinking. 

The Bombing of London

   We left London when it was hugely destroyed by the Great Fire. For nearly 300 years Londoners lived peacefully but everything changed when the World War II begun. 
  On 7 September 1940 the German aircraft started bombing the capital of Great Britain. It was the largest collection of aircraft ever seen. The country was put on the highest alert. Nazis was hoping that the bombing would destroy London and weaken the spitit of its inhabitants but to their suprise Londoners became even stronger and weren't planning to give up so easily. At that hard time existed a popular sentence, the catchphrase of the Blitz : "We can take it".
  The horrible bombing continued for  the next 76 nights! People living not only in London but also in the near areas lived in constant fear. They had to be always prepared for the worst. Anytime they could be dead and everything around could be destroyed..

Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damage in South Londnon (10 September 1940)

sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/events/germany_bombs_london

http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/ww2-the-blitz-hits-london

The great fire of London

If there's a one thing about the history of London that the majority of the people knows, it is the Great fire of London, the fire that destroyed over a quarter of the capital city.
  The fire begun on 2 September 1666 at 1 am in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Thomas Farriner - the baker, his daughter and servants were all sleeping upstairs when the fire woke them up. Everyone managed to jump out the window and escaped,exept one maid that was too frightened to jump. She was the first of many sufferers of the Great fire. Experts say that Pudding Lane was probably one of the worst places to start the fire because of the amount of easily burning things.
 A "funny" thing is that The Lord Mayor went out to look at the fire but he didn't consider it as a very serious problem so he went back to sleep.
 The fire spread really quickly and the wooden buildings cathed it easily.The major problem of the Fire was an inadequate equipment to firefight that barely did help.The Great fire continued until September 5th. The effects of it were dramatic: around 13.000 buildings had been destroyed and between 65.000 to 80.000 people had lost their houses. London was covered in ash...

sources:

http://www.fireoflondon.org.uk/story/the-fire/

http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/the-great-fire-of-london

The 1665 plague

 The worst fear of medevial people was the plague. There were a lot of them throughout the centuries but the one that will always remain in London's memory will definately be the plague from 1665.
  That epidemic was so tragic mostly because of two factors. The first was the amount of the dead during that plague: It was over 100.000 people, which at that time was 1/3 of the total population. The second was the wrong assumption that the Great Fire (1666) had cleansed the city of the disease.
 Some people believe that the epidemic was caused by black rats living in London, but there's also a theory that it was the water that carried the disease. But no matter what caused the plague, the river definately didn't get rid of it. 
 Only wealthy people could afford running away from London at that time (it was almost 20 % of London population). Thanks to one person that stayed in London during the 1665 plague we know how it all looked like. It was Samuel Pepys who wrote about the epidemic in his journal. This is a fragment from "The journal of the plague, year 1665" :

"Lord! how empty the streets are and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets full of sores; and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that."

source:
http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/samuel-pepys-and-the-1665-plague