Imagine you are in your final days of study in Budapest. So, on your last weekend, you plan a train trip from Budapest to Prague. You only have a couple of days to make the trip.

You buy a ticket leaving on a Friday night. But after your last class, your professor offers a dinner to congratulate you with a celebration. You have to agree, but your eye is always on the clock.

Dinner takes longer than you thought it would and finally you thank him and say you have a train to catch. But he insists you stay for a quick dessert and offers to drive you to the station. You figure that if he drives you, you will have just enough time to catch your train. But after the dessert, he remembers, “Oh, I didn’t drive. How silly of me!” leaving you to hurry to the station.

Unfortunately, the train—your train—is pulling away. And there won’t be another one until the next night. You have missed your train. And that brings us to our expression for today: That train has left the station.

If you like expressions about boats, you can also say “That ship has sailed” or that someone has “missed the boat”. They are all used the same way.

Besides missing an opportunity, all of these expressions could be used in another situation: When events have been put into place and there is no stopping them.

For example, let’s say your mother wants to fix you up with the nice child of her boss. She arranges the date without talking to you first. You don’t want to go, but she has already told her boss you would. She can say “Sorry, but the train has already left the station. You must go on that date.”

“Where did the Christmas basket sitting on our front porch come from? ” I thought to myself. I’d just returned from the bank, where I’d withdrawn enough cash to get us through the holidays. Life was a struggle, raising two teenagers as a single mom while working two part-time jobs and taking college courses at night. I was extremely tired.

Looking for a card or note, I searched the basket which was filled with all sorts of holiday foodstuffs. However, there was none. Had someone entered my name into a charity? The timing couldn’t have been better. It would support us through a period of difficult time.

At that very moment I felt a bit guilty (内疚). Wasn’t there someone else out there who needed it more? Yes, my kids and I were struggling, but my grandparent relied only on the state pension (国家抚恤金) to get by. At least I could always pick up extra hours at work. And when I finished my degree, things would improve a lot.

My conscience (良心) won the debate. I drove to Grandma and Grandpa’s little two-room house. Grandma opened the door. “Merry Christmas, Grandma!” I said, handing the Christmas basket to her. Grandma was thrilled. “Oh, thank you, Connie! We’ll be able to have such a nice dinner this Sunday. This will really help us until our pension come. But what about you?” “We’ll be fine,” I said. After a short visit I excused myself. “I still have a lot of work to do, so I should head back.”

On the way home, thinking about Grandma’s smile, I knew the basket had gone to the right place. But like Grandma said, what about us? I still worried about how I could afford to make Christmas special for my kids. Then I saw it in front of my house, in the same spot as before — an identical Christmas basket, every bit as lovely as the first.

For thousands of years, the most important two buildings in any British village have been the church and the pub. In fact, until a place has a church and a pub, it isn’t really considered a community worthy of a name. Traditionally, the church and the pub are at the heart of any village or town, since it is where people gather to give and receive news. In fact, the word ‘pub' is short for public house.   

That’s how it used to be, but things are beginning to change. It is said that the credit decline is causing 39 British pubs a week to go out of business. People don’t have lots of spare money to spend on beer. Recently, the UK government banned smoking in all pubs, and that may also have affected the number of customers going to pubs.

This decline is happening despite the fact that in recent years the UK government has started to allow pubs to stay open after 11 p. m. Previously, with 11 p. m. as closing time, customers would have to drink quite quickly, meaning they sometimes got more drunk than they would if allowed to drink slowly. The British habit of drinking a lot very quickly is known as “binge drinking”, and it causes some long-term health problems for people and problems with violent crime for communities. The UK government is changing the law to discourage binge drinking, and regularly spends money on television advertisements to warn people of the problems of drinking too much.

In order to save their businesses, pubs are trying to change with the market. Now, there are a number of different types of pubs.

As you can see, British pubs now offer something for everyone. A lot of pubs used to be

working men’s clubs, meaning that women could not usually enter. Today, however, women can freely enter 99% of pubs without experiencing any problems. Perhaps things are changing for the better after all.