Name: 872. The Birthday Party (Learn English with a Short Story)
Uploaded: 2025-11-28T16:05:12.000Z
Duration: 47 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Future simple

In this episode, I'm going to tell you a story and then use it to help you learn English.

And I'm going to do this in three sections.

First, I'll just tell the story to you and you can use that as a sort of little listening exercise or listening test.

See if you understand everything in the story and especially things like how the characters feel and exactly what happened.

So it'll just take a couple of minutes for me to read the story to you, and

then after that I will just explain what happened in the story in my own words.

And then I'll go through the story again line by line and I'll explain vocabulary for you so you can learn various little phrases, words and other descriptive language from this story.

Okay, so the story that we're looking at here is called the Birthday Party, and

it was written by Catherine Brush, who was an American newspaper columnist, short story writer, a novelist.

This particular story was published in 1946.

But like all good writing, it still remains fresh today.

It feels like it could have been written yesterday, really.

So although it was written a few decades ago, it still feels really sort of fresh and new.

So I'm going to start in just a second, but

first of all, just one question for you to consider before you listen to this.

Okay, My question is about people watching.

This is when you're in a public place, for example, in a restaurant, and

you kind of watch the other people around you and sort of, I don't know, imagine what their lives are like, observing other people.

I mean, it's a bit nosy, right, to do this, to look at other people and sort of spy on them.

People watch, okay, when you're in a public place, like a restaurant or in a queue for something.

So observing people, watching their behaviour, watching their interactions with each other, and

then imagining what kinds of people they are, what their lives are like, what their relationships are like.

It might also include eavesdropping, which means actually listening to other people's conversations, but not necessarily.

So people watching, just watching people watching strangers that you might see in public places.

If you're out in public, do you ever discreetly watch the other people around you and try to imagine what their lives are like?

For example, if you're in a restaurant, do you subtly, while you're eating your food, do you subtly, without being noticed, have a look at the other people on the other tables, try to imagine who they are, what's going on in their lives.

And have you ever observed something amusing or something that made you feel a little uncomfortable or embarrassed?

Like maybe you got an insight into someone's personal relationship or family life and it actually made you feel even a little bit uncomfortable or embarrassed or awkward or even sad?

People watch and have you ever noticed anything sort of interesting when doing that?

That's just something to think about before we start the story.

All you need to do here is just listen first.

Just listen and try and follow the main events.

Okay, I'll explain in my own words in a moment and then we'll go through all the vocabulary and stuff and see what we can learn.

This is the Birthday Party by Katharine Brush.

They were a couple in their late 30s, and they looked unmistakably married.

They sat on the banquette opposite us in a little narrow restaurant having dinner.

The man had a round, self satisfied face with glasses on it.

The woman was fadingly pretty in a big hat.

There was nothing conspicuous about them, nothing particularly noticeable, until the end of their meal when it suddenly became obvious that this was an occasion.

In fact, it was the husband's birthday and the wife had planned a little surprise for him.

It arrived in the form of a small but glossy birthday cake with one pink candle burning in the center.

The head waiter brought it in and placed it before the husband, and

meanwhile the violin and piano orchestra played Happy Birthday to you.

And the wife beamed with shy pride over her little surprise.

And such few people as there were in the restaurant tried to help out with a pattering of applause.

It became clear at once that help was needed because the husband was not pleased.

Instead, he was hotly embarrassed and indignant at his wife for embarrassing him.

You looked at him and you saw this and you thought, oh, now don't be like that.

And as soon as the little cake had been deposited on the table and the orchestra had finished the birthday piece and the general attention had shifted from the man and the woman.

I saw him say something to her under his breath, some punishing thing, quick and curt and unkind.

I couldn't bear to look at the woman then, so I stared at my plate and waited for quite a long time.

She was still crying when I finally glanced over there again.

Crying quietly and heartbrokenly and hopelessly all to herself under the gay big brim of her best hat.

I think that's a really, really well written little story.

A perfect little portrait of these two people and a little interaction which seems to tell you so much about what's going on between them.

The writer says that she saw this couple.

They were probably in their late 30s and they were definitely married.

They were sitting just on the other side of the restaurant, just opposite them at a table having dinner.

She said that the man had a round face, glasses, and

he had a sort of self satisfied look on his face.

The woman was, was fadingly pretty, like she kind of used to be pretty or she's sort of her, her beauty is fading or maybe getting less, you know, as she gets older, maybe.

And they just look like an ordinary couple, really.

They weren't bringing too much attention to them, to themselves, except for the fact that the woman was wearing a nice big hat with a wide brim.

And the narrator of the story realizes that this is not just an ordinary dinner, but

In fact, it's the husband's birthday and the wife has planned a special little surprise for him.

And she, she seems to be kind of a bit shy about it and quite proud of the fact that she's organized this little special thing for his birthday.