Good Night

By Philippe Guillaume

A busy day.
Many problems.
Clean your mind with something interesting to read.
Unknown or forgotten moments of history.
Odd mathematical problems and solutions.
Some general knowledge.
And even the crumbs of your bad day will disappear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728395814

Philippe Guillaume

Philippe Guillaume was born in 1934 to a family of Belgian diplomats. He entered the Belgian diplomatic service in 1960, joined the Belgian embassies in Kingston, Santo Domingo, Bonn, Warsaw, Paris, Tehran and returned to Brussels. He remains passionate about world politics.

Book preview

I ’m with friends and, they say the official time is five o’clock. But my watch indicates five hours and five minutes. Who is right?

My wristwatch is my best friend. He lives next to me day and night. He never complains. When I look at him, he opens his arms to me. If both hands come together twelve times a day, only four times a day does he meditate with his hands closed—at half past 6 a.m., at noon, at half past 6 p.m., and at midnight. He has all my affection and confidence. He has no reason to lie to me. If he gives me the time, it is to help me. It is thanks to this help that I know what will happen in five minutes at the official time.

What’s the official time? I don’t trust it. I don’t know its owner. I don’t know if it’s honest. Why does it never give the same time as my watch? Do you want everyone to be late for my time? Who pays you to keep the population in arrears? It’s criminal.

But to reflect, isn’t it the very idea of the clock that is false? In Rome, the solar day has twelve hours. The first hour is at sunrise, the seventh hour at noon. And the twelfth hour ends at sunset.

Then, in winter, the hours are shorter than in summer. It is, therefore, a natural and ecological solar system and did not prevent Rome from creating the most extended empire in the history of Europe.

2

The Story of Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Alexander Fleming

F leming was a poor farmer in the south-west of Scotland. One day, he heard screams from a nearby swamp. He ran and saved a boy who was drowning. He helped the boy warm up and took him home.

On the following day, the father went to see the man who saved his son. He wanted to thank and compensate the man for his courage. Fleming replies that he did nothing extraordinary and that what he did was normal. At that moment, Fleming’s son entered the house. The father saw the boy and offered to pay for him to have the same education as his own son. Fleming agreed.

The two boys went to school together.

Fleming ended up at the school of Our Lady’s Hospital in London.

This gentleman was Sir Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, and his son was Sir Winston Churchill. Fleming’s son was Sir Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin.

Sir Winston and Sir Alexander were friends all their lives. At one point, Churchill caught pneumonia. And it was this new drug that had just been discovered, penicillin, that saved his life.

Fleming died in 1955 at the age of seventy-four, and Churchill at the age of ninety-one. They were buried in the same cemetery in London.

(There are people who say that this story is mythology.)