Source A: Lunch by the windows

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At half past eleven, the kitchen was exactly as I had planned it. Sixty bowls stood in rows beside the serving hatch. The soup moved slowly in two enormous pans, and the volunteers crossed the room carrying bread, spoons and jugs of water. I checked the clock and allowed myself to feel pleased. For once, we were ahead of time.

Then the lights went out. The refrigerators stopped humming, the extractor fan became silent and the clock above the door vanished into a blank grey circle. For several seconds, nobody moved. Without the familiar noises, the kitchen seemed to be holding its breath.

I pressed the light switch. Nothing happened. I pressed it again, harder, as though determination could travel through the plastic and repair the electricity. When I turned round, the volunteers were watching me. Until that moment, I had thought of the power cut as something happening to the building. Their faces reminded me that it was also happening to the lunch.

I wanted to tell everyone to wait until the power returned, but waiting was not a plan. We opened the shutters and moved the tables nearer the windows. One volunteer checked which food could still be served safely, while another telephoned the building manager. The soup was already hot, so we wrapped the pans in clean towels to keep in the heat. I crossed items off my list and wrote new instructions in the spaces between them.

The room gradually filled with different sounds: shutters scraping, chairs being dragged and people calling questions across the kitchen. None of it resembled the calm morning I had arranged. Yet each completed task made the room feel less helpless. My list had once been a promise that everything would happen in a particular order. Now it became a record of useful changes.

When the first visitors arrived, the lights were still off. Sunlight lay across half the tables, and the far end of the hall remained dim. We served smaller portions of soup with extra bread and explained the delay. It was not the lunch I had pictured, but it was lunch. I stopped looking at the dead clock and opened the door for the next person.

Source B: Between stations

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

I had chosen the early train because I dislike arriving in a hurry. My notes were arranged in a blue folder, my ticket was in the outside pocket of my bag and I had allowed forty minutes to walk from the station to the hall. I was due to give a talk to a group of students. As the train left my town, I read the opening paragraph once more and imagined myself beginning in a calm voice.

Ten minutes later, the train slowed and stopped between two stations. Outside the window, there was only a brick wall covered with old rain marks. The silence lasted long enough for everyone to look up from their phones. Then an announcement apologised for a signal problem but gave no time for our journey to continue.

I checked my watch. I calculated how late I would be if we moved in five minutes, then ten, then twenty. Each calculation produced a worse answer without changing anything beyond the glass. I began to resent the other passengers for looking so comfortable, although they had no more control over the train than I did.

A second announcement gave us no new information. I took out my notes but could no longer understand the sentences I had written. They seemed to belong to the organised person who had boarded the train. I imagined the audience waiting in an empty hall and my name being removed from the programme. In my mind, a delay had already become a disaster.

Eventually, I telephoned the organiser. She thanked me for letting her know and said the students could begin another activity. Her ordinary voice reduced the disaster to a practical problem. I put the folder away and helped an older passenger lift a case that had fallen into the aisle. Neither action moved the train, but both were more useful than checking my watch.

We arrived thirty minutes late. I had to shorten the talk, and I began without reading the opening paragraph I had practised. My voice was not as calm as the one I had imagined, but the students listened. On the journey home, I realised that my careful preparation had not been wasted. It had simply prepared me for the wrong part of the day.