Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which you’d written, so you tell me, while under the onslaught of demands from your editor to review four ‘real doorstoppers’ of books – of which one was on the subject of physics! I never took to physics, our teacher being a nasty bully of a man who would take great pleasure in chucking the blackboard eraser at anyone he decided wasn’t concentrating, or flinging the rubber bungs meant to be used as stoppers for glass chemical flasks at the wall to get our full attention. It’s surprising quite how much of a BANG a solid chunk of latex at high velocity can make when it hits a brick wall – but what alarmed us more was Mr B’s downright dangerous disregard of the laws of his own subject regarding the risks of rubbery ricochet.
🙄 🚨 🤕

🥦 Bonkers for brassicas

You ask if I’ve ever been a vegan. I haven’t, no, nor vegetarian. There are plenty of points to consider on both sides of the debate, and I’m pretty happy to be omnivorous.

I met a most unlikely vegetarian chap when I was at university in the mid 1990s. In our entire acquaintance the only vegetable I ever saw him consume was potato, and never an actual potato either, but only ever in the form of crisps and chips, and very often accompanied by cheese. If he’d been trying to fly the flag for vegetarianism he would have done better to ditch the cheesy chips and perk up his facial pallor by introducing a habit of broccoli consumption. 🥦

Although he wasn’t a student of maths I’m sure he would have been perfectly able to calculate that the first 75% of the word VEGETARIAN is the first two thirds of VEGETABLE.

I love vegetables, with cruciferous veggies being my favourite – I’m in seventh heaven this week, as Brussels sprouts have come into season. I’ve got a standing order with my grocery service for 1.5kg to be delivered every Tuesday.

I did dabble with – brace yourself – a carnivore 🥩 eating style a few years ago. All plants contain carbohydrate, and as a type-1 diabetic who calculates the carb count of, and corresponding insulin dose required for, every single thing she eats, I thought it would be a most excellent wheeze to cut out the carbs completely in favour of only animal products. I lasted only a couple of days eating only eggs, cheese, minced beef and pork belly – not always all on the same plate – before my body and mind screamed out for relief. I MISSED PLANTS! I’m happy to report that since reverting to eating everything in moderation, and with correctly-calculated doses of insulin on board, well, everything’s much better.

🥐 Locally-sourced goodies

In your letter you have described my home turf as ‘…a remote village with only one café’. Well, you’re absolutely right, and you and Elaine have both visited it and passed it fit for purpose, but it’s not the only place around here to get food. The Village Stores has a selection of freshly-baked pastries every day, serves hot sausage rolls and pasties (traditional and cheese & onion) on Thursdays, and orders several dozen Scotch eggs from the butcher to sell on Fridays.

🍻 Jim and I have bought a pub!

Okay, not a whole one. Cards on the table: we have each bought some shares in our local. There used to be two pubs in the village, but one was converted into houses a few years ago. The remaining pub is up for sale, and a share offer was launched at the beginning of this month with a view to residents of the village – and other supporters – to own it between them as a Community Pub. Less than two weeks into a six-week process half the money has already been raised, so, if it all goes to plan, next time you and Elaine come down to see us we can have a drink together in ‘our’ pub! 🍻

It’ll need refurbishing, of course – although perhaps I won’t suggest you for a contractor now that I’ve read your paragraph entitled DIY or, in my case, do or die. You described in hilarious fashion (please define the tool you call ‘some sort of theodolite thing’, because I’ve no idea) the shelves you managed to put up 30° off the plane you’d anticipated, so I hope since those went up – and I use the term ‘up’ very loosely – you have given the toolbox a wide berth.

Soon after Jim had moved to his previous house he’d regaled a long-distance friend with tales of everything he was doing to improve it. Before long, a day came when something unusual came flying through the letterbox, landing on the hall floor with a clatter.

The postman had delivered a piece of wood, 43cm x 4cm x 1.5cm, which was naked apart from an address label (house name: ‘DIY COTTAGE’), three first-class stamps stuck straight onto the wood, and a scrawled ‘Best wishes, G & J & kids X’.

⏰ Oh the times they are a changin’…

Terry, how are you coping with the new feel of the day now that our clocks have changed? Although I was grateful for that first morning’s extra hour of sleep, two weeks later my brain still can’t work out whether it’s got jetlag or whiplash.

What didn’t help was an e-mail I’d received on the eve of the clocks changing from an online local news network with this headline:

That’s right, Terry, BACKWARDS. 🙄

🔄

Surely backWARDS suggests a continuing activity, rather than a wham, bam one-off occurrence. Well, if I’d managed to reverse time, as per their instruction, and my clocks were going backwards, it would probably be about now that I would be writing to Sussex Alerts with my scoop that I AM SUDDENLY GETTING YOUNGER…… which I’m not, as the birthday cards which arrived recently can testify.

👻 Spooky stuff

Did you survive Halloween unscathed? I remember visiting New York City one October when I was a small child and being overwhelmingly terrified of the crazy 2-storey high decorations outside people’s homes. And when I saw the scene in E.T. in which all the kids – and their alien friend – went trick or treating, well, I had no idea what was going on. These days, though, it seems that we Brits are party to this party ourselves. Reading last weekend’s Telegraph magazine I had to laugh at this pithy opinion from columnist William Sitwell, who referred to October 31 as the ‘…annual ghastly excuse to harass people in their own homes…’

Oh well, each to their own! 👻

Autumn weather being what it is – by which I mean a tonne of rain and impenetrable, grubby mist thrown up by lorries on the bypass – I popped into Halfords, a car supplies and bicycle shop, last week to get some more screenwash for my car. I was amused to see a sign which read as follows:

PLEASE DISMOUNT
YOUR BICYCLE
BEFORE
ENTERING
STORE

It puzzles me that this needed to be said, and I can only imagine what actions from customers might have prompted such a sign to be ordered. 😤

💬 Cryptic corner

Speaking of puzzles, well, I drew multiple blanks from the incomplete crossword grid you’d sent me because you’re too lazy to finish it yourself but I AM very happy to report that I have solved your other word puzzle! And I’m in excellent company, too: our mutual friend of reported in her comment on your letter last week that she had solved it – and kept us all guessing by not giving the answer away so that we could all work it out for ourselves. ☺️

You’d written that the first two or three answers for the ‘across’ clues in the Telegraph Quick Crossword always form a well-known word or phrase, and had given the example of the first two answers being Cycle; Logical – as in PSYCHOLOGICAL.

Here’s the sequence of clues you’d given me to tackle:

Adult male (3)
Eggs (3)
Experiencing tedium (5)

Answers:

Man
Ova
Bored
= MAN OVERBOARD 🛟

As you know, Terry, I love things like this!

Here’s my challenge: a traditional cryptic crossword clue for you (and you too, Sharron!). It’s from the October 11 edition of The Daily Telegraph. Ready?

A sundae ordered in the morning or endlessly (2, 7)

What’s the answer, and why?

*sniggers* 🤭

All the very best, as always,

Rebecca

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which I thoroughly enjoyed. You seemed concerned that your unanticipated delay in responding was such that an effusive apology was required, but none was necessary. Heck, I’m the kind to enjoy a ‘just pick up where we left off’ kind of a relationship with people,1 and it’s a pleasure whenever you – or indeed anyone – deigns to write to me!

🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛ Pets’ corner

I was pleased to read your update on the health and wellbeing of your three cats – or, as you’d put it, ‘feline parasites’ – and to see your spotters’ guide to the kinds of other critters which rely on you and Elaine for sustenance. One question: which way round is your wasp? I can’t quite make it out.

It reminds me of a friend’s dog – a particularly hairy specimen of the Affenpinscher breed – whose tail is untrimmed and as frizzy as his gorgeous face. Looking at him sideways on (the dog, not the friend), when he’s stationary it’s very difficult to identify which end is which.

🔍 Some more thoughts on identification

Terry, you asked me to tell you which Shakespeare character is shown in this drawing:

My first thought was Hamlet’s love interest, Ophelia – specifically in act 4, scene 7 – until I remembered the extremely bloodthirsty 2003 production2 of Titus Andronicus I’d seen at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. I wonder if your picture shows one of the unfortunate chaps who’d been baked into the meat pie served in that play’s final scene? If so, a) he needs a haircut and b) your gravy’s too runny. 🥧

📜 The simplification of Shakespeare

Thank you for your insights into making the works of the Bard a little more concise, including Hamlet’s To be, or not to be soliloquy. Your version of the whole thing, let me remind you, was this:

Oi, Mush, make up yer mind!

I remember seeing a production of Tom Stoppard’s Fifteen minute Hamlet, a play in which the meat of the drama is condensed into a 13-minute performance. The piece earns its title thanks to the addition of an encore which condenses everything the audience has just seen into a two-minute summary. Have you ever seen it, Terry? It’s an absolute hoot!

You’re right to remind me of Harry Matthews’ 35 variations on a theme from Shakespeare. In the first course you’d taught me, Creative Writing Using Constraints, you took us through a number of exercises, including the task to modify the line ‘All that glisters is not gold’ from The Merchant of Venice.

I had a look through my notes from the day – please excuse my handwriting – and you can see that I came up with several variations. Not all of them were bonkers! 🤪

🪣 On decorating

So, over at Freedman Towers you’re in the throes of decorating? So’s Jim, as it happens. ‘One of these days’, I asked him recently, ‘could we please get a handle for this door?’ I was told we didn’t need to. ‘The handle’s right there!’ he said, pointing into the corner on the floor behind the always-open door between the kitchen and the dining room. ‘I’m going to put it back on once I’ve finished painting the door!’

Pause.

‘I’ve made a start!’ he reassured me, drawing my attention to the tatty masking tape protecting the glazed panels.

‘When was that again?’

‘2004.’

That’s when he’d moved into Chateau Snaps. Terry, I left it there. 🙄

There’s a fantastic DIY reference in this letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, published on August 23, 2025.

💭 Puzzle corner

Thank you for your crossword clue!

Plain butter? No! (8, 4)

I identified butter straight away as GOAT – as in something which butts – but had to think a little harder as to what the 8-letter word might be. Plain, of course, is a flat area of land, so…. prairie? 🤔 No, of course not – that’s only seven letters – and what on earth is a ‘prairie goat’, for goodness’ sake?!

I read the clue again, and realised I’d overlooked the No! part. Obviously the opposite of a plain was called for… which is, of course, MOUNTAIN.

Et voilà: MOUNTAIN GOAT (8, 4). 🏔️ 🐐

✒️ On writing, travelling, and writing about travelling

I’ve been reading a lot of travel memoirs recently. Last week I picked up Cold Hands, Warm Heart by Tess Burrows, which is the story of the writer’s journey with her partner to the South Pole. I love to travel vicariously through others more intrepid than I, and I wondered whether I, a not-very-far-flung traveller, could one day write about places I’ve never been to.

I’d had a thought about this already just recently, when I picked up a dog-eared copy of Jeffrey Archer’s 1980 book of short stories A Quiver full of Arrows. The stories are clever – all have a twist in the tale (in fact, that’s even the name he gave to his second book of short stories) – and I particularly enjoyed the one entitled The Hungarian Professor, in which a professor of English takes the opportunity to chat to a British student visiting Budapest in the latter’s native tongue. They talk about the professor’s favourite parts of Britain.

‘…to drive across the Mendips through perpetually green hilly countryside and to stop at Cheddar to see Gough’s caves, at Wells to be amused by the black swans ringing the bell on the Cathedral wall, or at Bath to admire the lifestyle of classical Rome, and then perhaps to go over the county border and on to Devon…’

About Oxford University, the professor said:

‘Magdalen is the most beautiful college. It has the distinct advantage of being situated on the River Cherwell; and in any case I confess a weakness for perpendicular architecture and a love of Oscar Wilde.’

Towards the end of the conversation, the student professes his interest in becoming a writer.

‘Then travel, travel, travel’, the professor said. ‘You cannot hope to learn everything from books. You must see the world for yourself if you ever paint a picture for others.’

It is only when the two were saying goodbye that the professor told the student that he had never left Hungary in his life.

I enjoy reading about writing just as much as I enjoy reading about travel. On Writing by Stephen King is a book I’ve just picked up to enjoy for the second time, and also, I was very taken by an interview with author Ken Follett which I read in the Daily Telegraph on October 4.

Follett describes this as the best advice he’s ever been given:

‘For a long time, I had an agent who would read my first drafts. The thing he scribbled on them most often was “Feeling how?”. I would write: “John left the room”, and he would write: “Feeling how?”. When I started out, I was good on plots, but not so good on feelings. I had to learn to do more of that and to do it better. The best advice I got was to always answer the question: “How is this character feeling now?”’

Follett is a fiction writer, and I am not. What I most enjoy writing about are little snippets from my life; things I’ve experienced both in my last fifty years and in everyday life today. That’s what I love about our exchange of letters, too: they’re an opportunity to explore my thoughts of now, to use your letters to me as writing prompts to fuel the paragraphs in my replies, and to have a giggle about the things I’m noticing around me. I wonder, when you read them, can you ever tell what I was feeling when I was writing them?

Terry, it’s terrific to have you back!

All the very best, as always,

Rebecca

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which I read with both alarm and enjoyment. I’m sorry to hear that two thirds of the feline population of Freedman Towers have been such a cause for concern. I trust that Bigfoot has become Smallerfoot since you wrote last week, and that Willow’s feeling much better and less fed up with having to be carted to the vet daily. I’m sending them every good wish!

While we’re on the subject, your kind offer of the opportunity to ‘buy a couple of cats’ is one I shall be declining. Thanks, anyway.

🖋️ Rambling language

Onto the parts of your letter which I enjoyed, though, and I must say that I was very taken with your feeling that ‘writing should reflect the way people actually speak’. You referred to Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling as having ‘no fancy language’, and your observation that ‘There’s no long-winded Shakespearean guff about the morn in russet mantle clad walking over the mist of a distant hill. Give me a break. No, this book tells how it is: stark, plain, relentless’ caused a cranial cascade into cacchinatory convulsions made me laugh.

Might it be fun one day to have a go at writing Shakespeare using straight-down-the-line, no-messing-about Terry-and-Rebecca contemporary language? Perhaps we should each take the same chunk of, say, Henry IV Part II* and see how our own versions differ firstly to the original, and to each other’s?!

*other plays are available

🍺 A beer-fuelled editing service

I remember once being asked by a friend at university – a Masters student of electronic engineering – to see what I could do about altering what he called ‘a rather repetitive phrase’ in his thesis, whose working title was Network Time Reference.

I was pleased as Punch with my alternative of the interval measured by the device to his the time timed by the timer, and suggested he take me to the student bar for a celebratory pint.

‘Hmmmmmm’, he told me. ‘I think you ought to squeeze one mention of time back into it, given the whole thing is about, well, time.

We went back to the drawing board over our first pint, and began long, multi-pint discussions over how time should duly be squeezed back in. What should it be?

The time measured by the device?

The interval timed by the device?

The interval measured by the timer?

To this day I don’t recall which one we went for, but I do know we had a super evening! 🍺

📚 Reading and reviewing

Well, you’ve had some work on your hands – I can’t imagine having four books to review all at the same time! A short review is, well, short, but there’s no getting away from having to do a whole load of reading in order to get an understanding of what it is you’re reviewing and to give your considered response to it.

There’s a book I’ve read recently which I’d love to write about on Dear Reader, I’m lost, but the angle I’ve chosen for my essay has required me both to read its sequel and reread a book I’d last opened at school! It’s nothing in comparison to what you’re having to do, firstly being only three books and secondly it being entirely my choice what to – and indeed whether to – read!

Speaking of being people overwhelmed with work, I took this screenshot recently of the online calendar I share with Jim. Hope it gives you as much of a laugh as it did me!

🏕️ A much-needed holiday

Ah yes, overwhelm. Well, I don’t think I’d realised quite how much I needed a break until Jim and I headed off in our van for our trip to the West Country a couple of weeks ago! We met up with members of both sides of our family: two thirds of his family and a third of mine have recently – although not together! – relocated to beautiful Dorset, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with all of them.

We stopped on the New Forest on our way in order to stretch our legs and have lunch, and at a picnic table in a sheltered spot we saw two ladies settling down to have theirs. They’d spread a tablecloth out, had a couple of large bags in front of them, and were busy setting out things that looked, well, not in the least bit like lunch!

Terry, they were setting up a game of Scrabble! After our walk we passed them again, and they were engrossed with the game they were playing with a full-sized board with lovely wooden tiles and letter racks. Incongruous and absolutely flipping fabulous.

Their tablecloth was beautiful; dark blue with white stars and crescent moons all over it. At first glance I thought they’d just wanted their table to look pretty, but the cloth had a practical purpose, too. Here’s a snap of a neighbouring table – I’ll leave you to imagine the inconvenience of picking up Scrabble tiles from the forest floor had the ladies not had a tablecloth on theirs to cover all of those gaps!

Next on our destination list was Devon, the next county along if you keep heading left – sorry, west – and I’d assumed that the drive would not amount to, what, more than an hour or so. Terry, it turns out that Devon is immense! After well over three hours we arrived at our campsite, where, having been before, we were delighted to be greeted like long-lost friends by the site team.

Over our three-day stay Jim headed off to recce four different – and, to varying degrees, very remote – woodland locations to shoot for his latest book project, which gave me the fabulous opportunity for a bit of walking, a lot of reading and plenty of time to mull over future writing projects.

Writing. That thing I love. Well, my writing log is jam-packed with no end of ideas, snippets of conversations heard and plenty of things I’ve read and experienced… but with my laptop not being flipped open even once on our trip I’m afraid none of these jottings has yet quite borne fruit.

You see, I’m tired. I’m absolutely fine, and although I’m getting plenty of things done – the catering and laundry at Chateau Snaps, getting into a super (albeit tiring, but it feels like good tiring!) routine of swimming with Mum, sometimes reading, sometimes not – I’m not spending terribly much time engaging with the fabulous and lovely gang of writers and readers on Substack.

I’ll get there. I know I will.

👨‍🎓 The crossword column

While I’m spending my time pacing myself I’ve been enjoying the sorts of pastimes I can dip in and out of, with my beloved cryptic crosswords an excellent example.

I’m very proud of my efforts so far with this one from the Daily Telegraph on Saturday 26 July, although three clues still confound me. Any ideas?

6 down: Several overcome by river current like bore? (9)
W _ A _ I _ O _ E

23 down: Singular odds for a kind of rugby (6)
_ _ _ E _ S

25 across: Arrived unexpectedly going among Scots to drink (5, 4)
T _ B _ E _ I _ _

🥪 The chiller cabinet

Remember that bonkers M&S strawberries and cream sandwich brought out in time for Wimbledon? Seems that Tesco have outdone their competition with their even more bonkers idea: a birthday cake sandwich. (I’d say that it knocks the Dutch chocolate spread sandwiches you’d mentioned in your letter into a cocked hat!)

I gather it has ‘divided opinion’. 🙄 Terry, it’s another ‘no thanks!’ from me….

All the very best, as always,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

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By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter. Although I question your harsh marking of my attempt to answer your question related to Some Like It Hot, I nevertheless admit in writing that indeed my answer was incomplete. I am grateful for your detailed expostulation on the film which filled some gaps in my knowledge about 1950s cinema, but, having been born 25 years after the film’s release, I feel there is a reasonable excuse for my ignorance. 😇

Your crossword clues were thankfully rather less of a challenge than your film quiz. You’d kindly provided a shot of some of the crossword grid from The Times, showing me that the first letter of the solution to 6 Across: Metal container (3) would also be the first letter of 6 Down: School term’s beginning with wet weather (5).

Well, there are plenty of three-letter words meaning container. A tub is a container, but plenty of tubs are made of materials other than metal. Tun? Bin? Again, a bin doesn’t have to be metal. Can?

Ha! Hang on, the clue is a double definition! Essentially the clue is asking for a three-letter word whose meaning is both metal and container. Et voilà: it’s TIN!

I could have saved myself some effort, having worked out 6 Down first, by narrowing down my shortlist of answers to 6 Across to only words starting with a t-. The clue was in plain sight: ‘Term’s beginning’ is t- for term.

What’s more, wet weather is rain. T- plus rain = train, which, in a verb context at least, is a synonym for school.

Last but not least, having neither read Hammett’s book nor seen the film starring Humphrey Bogart I was flummoxed initially by the clue you’d found in the Literary Review: Maltese Falcon detective in suit (5).Google has now told me that Bogart played a detective named Sam Spade in the film, and spade, of course, is a suit of cards. Again, a clue made up of a double definition. ♠️

Blimey, Terry, this is hard work. Why can’t you just solve these clues yourself rather than getting me to do them for you, hmm? 🙄

I was interested to see your picture of the proof copy of Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. It’s strange to see a book in A4-printed comb-bound format, rather than the style of volume you would find on a library bookshelf. I hadn’t known that advance copies would be any different to the finished product until I found this copy of Seizure by Erica Wagner in a second-hand bookshop a couple of years ago:

Although it looks more like a finished book than the example you had shown in your letter, it comes with intriguing warnings to the reader not to step on any editorial toes.

I was more interested in the novelness of the format than the novel itself at the time I bought it, but having taken it out of my bookcase to describe it to you I have dipped inside and gosh, I’m instantly compelled by the style of Wagner’s writing. This has jumped to the top of my pile of books I’d like to read next.

(And no, I shan’t be quoting it for publication. I’ll do as I’m told.)

Since my last letter, in which I expressed my surprise at the invention by M&S of the strawberries and cream sandwich, I’d been wondering about sweet sandwiches in general and fruit sandwiches in particular. As a child I remember jam sandwiches, and of course we’ve all heard of the PB&J, or peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so beloved across the pond, but the only time I’d come across fresh fruit between slices of bread had been in a fried cheese-and-apple sandwich which I’d seen being made on BBC children’s television programme Blue Peter and had subsequently tried making at home. (Spoiler: it wasn’t popular with those I had expected to eat it.)

I was tickled, then, to find this letter in a recent edition of The Daily Telegraph:

Terry, Jim and I are members of the National Trust, English Heritage and Historic Houses, whose sites not only offer super days out for those interested in historical buildings and beautiful gardens but which also provide welcome alternatives to motorway service stations on long drives for work or leisure. Our memberships give us free entry to their places which all have plenty of parking as well as loos, a café, a shop (often a second-hand bookshop, too) and the welcome opportunity to stretch our legs in a beautiful garden before continuing our journey.

Each of these organisations publishes a magazine at intervals throughout the year, and the crossword in Historic House is always a fascinating challenge.

Every edition’s puzzle has its own theme which, once identified, is very helpful in solving a large number of the clues. One of my favourites was related to James Bond films, names of actors, baddies and locations all featuring somewhere on the grid. And although the classics, I’m afraid, are all Greek to me, I was actually rather impressed by my performance tackling the grid pictured below, based on Homer’s The Iliad:

A recent example, though, was astonishing. Are you ready for this? I’d suggest you brace yourself for this set of multiple clues:

15, 18, 31 Across, 22, 36, 46, 25, 9, 43, 41 Down, 1.
‘Brilliant, high-thrill Lewis nonsense verse about mad mammal we got to be destroyed by midget hero with heavy dagger-stab’, edited into ‘Lewis verse’ in 38 Across. (4, 7, 3, 3, 6, 5, 3, 4, 3, 6, 2, 3, 4, 3, 5, 4, 3, 9, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8)

Oh, and 38 Across, because you need that too:

Crazy way BBC joker produces poem read by Alice. (11)

To my good fortune I had been introduced to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse at school, and therefore knew the answer to 38 Across as soon as I’d read ‘Brilliant, high-thrill Lewis nonsense verse’ in that first bonkers set of clues.

Crazy indicates an anagram, and the eleven letters of way BBC joker can of course be rearranged into Jabberwocky.

As for the first set of crazy clues, well, what is asked for here is simply – simply! – the first verse of the poem, right?

Yes….. but it’s cleverer than that! At first glance I’d wondered about the significance of the inverted commas around this chunk of text:

‘Brilliant, high-thrill Lewis nonsense verse about mad mammal we got to be destroyed by midget hero with heavy dagger-stab’

until it dawned on me that these, too, indicate an anagram. Here’s how Carroll himself had phrased this collection of letters in his nonsense poem Jabberwocky, in Through the Looking Glass, his 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

After I’d put all of those words into the right spaces on the crossword grid I needed to dunk my head into cold water! Actually, that’s not a bad idea anyway at the moment; it’s been ever so hot recently. On Sunday I was even spotted wearing SHORTS for the first time this year. 🤭

Today, thankfully, the third heatwave of the British summer so far has been replaced by an overcast day and 40mph winds to blow all of those sweaty summer cobwebs away – as well, I hope, as all of those nasty bitey creatures which have been finding my skin too delicious for comfort over the last couple of days. 🦟

It seems some ingenious methods for dealing with the heat have been adopted by readers of The Daily Telegraph. I wonder if this approach might be a good way to cool my own head down?

Terry, I might just try it. 🥵

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which as usual was a highly enjoyable read. It began impressively with your solution to the spooneristic crossword clue I’d sent you to tackle.

This was it:

Spooner’s settlement ten cents for break from work (8)

And here’s how you solved it:

I worked out half of the clue: ten cents = dime. However, I’m afraid I cheated and looked up the answer, which is downtime. The reason is as follows:

Settlement = town
Ten cents = dime

As those two answers are supposed to form one 8 letter word, we get Towndime. However, this is Spooner we’re talking about, so we switch the first letters of those two words. Thus:

Town = down
Dime - time
= downtime

Bravo, Terry!

🎬 Movie magic, movie mayhem

Part 1: 👍

Swerving away from crossword challenges – a great disappointment to me, given that I have just last weekend subscribed to NYT Games in order to hone my craft – you had instead set me two film-related questions.

Which film ends with the words “Nobody’s perfect”, and what was the context?

Although I’ve never watched the film, I was happy to recognise this as the final line from cross-dressing crime caper Some Like It Hot – a snippet of general knowledge which I’d probably picked up at a pub quiz somewhere.

Newsflash (courtesy of Reddit):

The film’s closing line was a placeholder that the writers never replaced with a better line. Despite not being intended for the final cut, it became the iconic ending and is ranked 78th on The Hollywood Reporter’s list of favourite movie lines.

Part 2: ⚠️

Terry, your six-line demand for the answer to ‘What’s the name of the song, featured in a film, in which the singer bemoans the fact that…….. [and which] ends, before the refrain, with the words “You’ll find my corpse draped over a rail”?’, led me, inevitably, to Google.

I entered only the phrase in inverted commas which you’d given me, as it was the only one specific enough to use as a search term – and as a result of my ensuing trauma I have now had to delete my internet history. Every search return was either harrowing, grisly or both, and had nothing to do with any film.

So, thanks for that. And I’m sorry, but I don’t have an answer to give you!

It’s your turn. Here’s the clue for 23 Down in the Daily Telegraph from June 7th:

Insect bite coming up (4)

What’s the answer, and why?

📚 The library list

My pile of books to read has grown rather a lot recently. Having finished – and thoroughly enjoyed – A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins I bought its sequel, The Walk West, which I can’t wait to start.

The thing is, other books have been making outrageous and unreasonable demands for my attention in the meantime. I’m around halfway through Mum’s copy of the hilarious and utterly delightful memoir The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell, a British teacher who saved an avian oil-slick survivor in the troubled Argentina of the 1970s and took it to work with him at a boarding school in Buenos Aires. I’m also itching to reread Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as background to a post I’m planning.

My bookshelves are creaking under the pressure, and I know for a fact that you face similar struggles at Freedman Towers. This little snippet I found online a few weeks ago, though, does make me feel a little better about my plight:

I’ve been plundering virtual shelves on the Libby app, too. I used to use the real-life library fairly often in years gone by, but since I started being able to access ebooks and audiobooks online, the added convenience – not least for my wallet – is brilliant.

Libraries are such a valuable resource. Look at this:

🏋️‍♀️ Gymming and swymming

I’m impressed with the report in your letter about your gym habit, although your picture of what you claim to look like after a visit has alarmed me somewhat. I’m reproducing it here with your kind permission:

I used to be a member of the health club at a local hotel a few minutes’ drive from Chateau Snaps, where I’d swim early almost every weekday morning and hit the gym a few times a week. I hadn’t been near the place since before the pandemic, but this morning Mum and I met there for a swim.

As I’d reported in my recent Water baby post, I have a chequered history with swimming. It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read it that this morning’s ‘swim’ amounted only to half a length of sculling on my back, a couple of lengths of Rebecca-special doggy paddle, several lengths of strolling back and forth for leg-strengthening purposes and a great deal of chatting.

📌 FULL REPORT

• Neither of us sank.

• One of us broke the swimsuit spin drier in the changing room.

• One of us couldn’t open her keypad-operated locker in order to get her stuff out of it.

• Both of us are shattered.

• We had such a nice time that we’re going back tomorrow!

• AND I’M SO PROUD!

🎾 The sports column

Speaking of exercise, Terry, bip-bop season is underway: yes, Wimbledon has started! In television terms these two weeks are the highlight of my viewing year, and the first day of this epic grand-slam grass court tennis championship saw seven British players make it through to the second round. More, I hope, will follow.

Wimbledon fortnight is the epitome of the British summer, and its bingo card always features the following:

1. A heatwave (today the mercury is nudging 35°C – that’s 95°F)

2. Torrential rain (not yet, but it’s inevitable)

3. Plenty of appearances in the Royal Box by members of the royal family

4. An inside-out umbrella (see ‘torrential rain’)

5. Sir Cliff Richard (bonus points if he stands up and sings)

6. A blown-away Panama hat (bonus points if it lands on Centre Court)

7. Queues for Pimm’s

8. Queues for strawberries and cream

Ah yes, strawberries and cream: a favourite Wimbledon treat. After a fifteen-year price freeze at £2.50, this year spectators are being charged £2.70 for a portion containing exactly ten strawberries. Sounds like pretty good value to me.

I wonder if you’ve tried the strawberries and cream sandwich that’s now available from M&S? No messing about with a warm scone, clotted cream and strawberry jam; no, M&S are whacking some halved strawbs and some sweetened whipped cream between two slices of bread and calling the result the new best thing since sliced bread.*

*Okay, I don’t know that they are calling it ‘the best thing since sliced bread’, but it feels like the right metaphor for me to stick on it.

Reviews are looking pretty good, though. Perhaps I should pop to M&S to find out whether the sandwich is worth the hype?

To accompany my own Wimbledon viewing, I’d far prefer strawbs picked in warm sunshine served with an equal (or greater!) volume of nicely-chilled Rodda’s clot, thanks very much. Bon ‘bip-bop’ appetit! 🍓🎾

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

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By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

It’s only now, a week after you’d published your latest letter, that I’ve noticed a challenge which you’d concealed in plain sight:

‘Spot the hidden song title’, you’d written as a sub-heading.

In your declaration that you’d been overcommitting your time recently, you told me that out of the classes you were taking on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, you had ‘…ditched the Friday course and feel much better for it. It’s surprising what a difference a day makes.’

Got it! What a Difference a Day Makes is a song popularised by Dinah Washington in 1959, when I was minus fifteen years old, although it had been written a full 25 years before that, in 1934, by Mexican songwriter Maria Grever. In its original Spanish it had been called Cuando vuelva a tu lado, or When I return to your side. Rather lovely!

I found the details above on Wikipedia.

🙇‍♂️ Very puzzling

You’ve given me two clues to attempt to solve this time:

Considerable trouble in darkest Yorkshire at the outset (4)

Trouble is often used in crossword clues to indicate that an anagram needs to be solved, although here it’s a red herring! At the outset tells me to look for the first letters of words, and given that I know the answer is four letters long it’s clear that it must be made up of the first letters of trouble, in, darkest and Yorkshire.

The solution – tidy – in British English, at least, is often used as a synonym for considerable, as in ‘it always takes me a tidy amount of time to make my letters to Terry even barely comprehensible’. 😉

Your second clue – full disclosure: I’d begged you in an e-mail for your assistance to solve it – was this:

Start of hundred inch garden feature? (5)

The beginning of the word hundred is the letter h.
Inch can mean to move slowly, and a synonym for that word in this context is edge.
H + edge = hedge
And lo, a hedge is a garden feature.

🙌

Easy when you know how… or whom to ask. 🤣

Here’s one from me from a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph:

Spooner’s settlement ten cents for break from work (8)

What’s the answer, and why?

🚐 On the road

Since I last wrote to you, Terry, Jim and I have been on a short break in our campervan to the smallest city in England: Wells in Somerset. My holiday snaps below show you at a glance quite how very energetic I was:

It was all go on Day 4, though. Jim had an all-day work commitment in Wells, and having been left to my own devices, under my own steam I had a fantastic explore of the place, dipping in and out of cafés and bookshops every five minutes whenever I needed a breather. I’m sure you’ll understand why when you see my step count:

Lots of things caught my eye on my multiple-stop tour of the city: the tiny beginnings of fruit appearing on the mulberry trees in the bishop’s palace garden, dogs paddling to cool off in the culverts beside the High Street containing the run-off from the wells from which the city took its name, and, best of all, this sign giving a very unspecific, tenuous explanation for a street name:

Okaaaaaaaaay………

I’m sorry, town planners, but ‘probably’ is hardly an obvious claim to fame. Did just one property-owning Chamberlain family exist during that whole historical period? The Middle Ages stretched from the fall of the Roman Empire in around 500 AD to the beginning of the Renaissance in the late 1400s, and there might have been four dozen or more entirely unrelated families named Chamberlain in that time! Also, the sign doesn’t actually specify a geographical area, so was the street even named after the Wells Chamberlains in the first place, hmmm? 🤔

I am happy – and even more surprised to write this that you will be to read it – to announce that in a whole day fending for myself I got lost precisely NOT EVEN ONCE. I even used a map sensibly enough to find it helpful – which, quite frankly, is a first.

Do please pardon the pun, but perhaps I have turned a corner… 🤣

👉 Biased handedness 👈

Terry, I’ve always known my left from my right, although in my 50 years of left-handedness I am still finding plenty of room for resentment at being sidelined by product designers insistent on catering only for the other 90% of the population:

The spatulas are an abomination which I would find deeply frustrating to use. The very existence of the right-handed cake fork annoys me no end (erm, why not just make symmetrical ones?), but I am proud to tell you, despite having always been very childish about the discriminatory handedness of cake forks, I have never yet allowed a right-handed one to prevent access to a little something to accompany my cuppa.

I want to have my cake and eat it too... Cos that’s life, innit? 🤷‍♀️

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which, as always, I enjoyed immensely. Please forgive my shrieks of silence in response until now – and thank you for not kicking up a fuss about this delayed reply.

Speaking of silence, I read with sympathy your account of coming up against some disruptive audience members at that screening of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro you’d attended recently, so I know you’ll appreciate this:

🔙 Driving in the wrong direction

Actually, quite a lot has been catching my eye in the newspaper recently – in fact, what a great resource for silly things to tell you about in my letters. 🤣 Last weekend, for instance, I laughed out loud when I read these words at the start of an article about safe driving:

It’s only 9.30am, but I’ve already spent more than an hour behind the wheel today, doing the school run. Later this afternoon, I will do it again in reverse.

🤣 Okay, I know what the author has written here isn’t exactly wrong, but given that the topic being discussed is driving a vehicle, the word reverse is rather too open to interpretation! How might you have phrased it better, I wonder? You know what, if I had been editing the piece I’d have been tempted to let this word choice stand, as it gave me such a giggle imagining the author driving backwards on her afternoon trip to pick up her children from school.

🤡 Mischievous misinterpretation

But hey, we see plenty of words around which are just begging to be misunderstood. In your last letter, in fact, you told me this:

Today in the supermarket, I came across this emblazoned on a packet of pizza-flavoured crisps:
‘Product should only be fed to seated, supervised young children.’

No pizza crisps for you then, Terry, given that you claim to be a grown-up.

There’s a super advert for washing pods on commercial TV at the moment which concludes, after a long pause, with this line, which you’ll notice omits any kind of reference to detergent whatsoever:

Always keep away from children.

Well, I’ve been keeping away from children ever since I stopped being one, so it seems I need no such instruction. 😉

🙇‍♂️ The cryptic corner

You’d piled on the challenges when you wrote last, Terry!

First, you’d given me two crossword clues to solve:

From the Literary Review:
Praying mantis disturbed (6)

Disturbed indicates an anagram. The solution is six letters, and helpfully there’s only one six-letter word in the clue. An anagram of mantis is matins, which is the name for a Christian service of morning prayer.

From the Times Cryptic:
Bishop moved to Lyme Regis to find romance (3,5,4)

Moved indicates an anagram, and we know that twelve letters are needed in total.
Bishop generally means that a B is sought, so B + to Lyme Regis = boy meets girl.
This one was not only elegant but delightful. Made me smile, you ol’ softy!

Here’s one for you, which is taken from the Saturday Telegraph’s Cross Atlantic crossword. It typically has a mixture of both simple and cryptic clues, the latter generally indicated by a question mark. A feature of this puzzle is that we’re not told how many letters (or indeed words) the solutions are made up of. But heck, I can count: and can reveal that a total of seven boxes in the grid were reserved for the solution(s) to the following clue:

Plant problem; marsupial march?

I’ll say again: there is a total of seven boxes available for the answer(s).

Any ideas?

As you know I like to tackle the cryptic crossword in the weekend paper, and I’m ashamed to admit that it is only very infrequently that I ever manage to solve more than a couple of clues. Admittedly it did take me days to get this far, but look at this:

For health reasons (oh gosh, I’m so frustrated by the situation!) I am really struggling to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few minutes, which is why some of the lovely people reading this missive over your shoulder might have noticed that Dear Reader, I’m lost is rather, well, lost right now, but dipping into tasks little and often does seem to be working for me in terms of crossword solving!

(Oh, and please feel free to fill in any of the gaps!)

In addition to your crossword clues you’d invited me to solve the following conundrum:

When someone offers me work or some other ‘opportunity’ that does not appeal, my standard response tends to be “Thank you but I’d prefer not to.” Which character in literature inspired this reply?

My answer: dunno.
Google’s answer: Bartleby.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by American writer Herman Melville. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk, who after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, responding to any request with the words “I would prefer not to.”
Taken from Wikipedia

In the dim and distant past – and for nine years, no less – I was the secretary for a local village committee. When a fellow member was asked at the Annual General Meeting to continue to serve in her existing role she replied ‘No thank you.’ Surprised, the asker repeated the question and got precisely the same response.

Terry, I was staggered – and not by her decision to step down, for that was of course totally acceptable, but by the concise elegance with which she had done so. Ever since then I have tried to remind myself that those three words alone are a valid, satisfactory and extremely liberating response to many – indeed most! – requests. I learned a lot from the retiring committee member at that meeting, and am still grateful to her.

👎 🟰 👍

🥣 Please sir, can I have some more?

Here’s someone who answers ‘yes please!’ to whatever’s being offered to him at the back door. This dapper chap – our tame(ish), temporarily tailless blackbird – has recently introduced us to his two fresh-from-the-nest offspring, who are so cute that we don’t (much) mind the outrageous demands for food being made on the back doormat ever five minutes. Here he is scooting up to fetch a beakful of mealworms for his babies:

🗺️ Not getting out much, but definitely still getting lost

Every day I like to play Upwords with family members. Do you know the game? It’s great fun! Here’s the start of a recent game with my mum, and I think we’re both still laughing at how very much this combination of words applies to me:

Happy days! 🤣

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

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By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, not least because it was largely about eggs: my breakfast food of choice.

🥪 Would you choose this for lunch?

Your description of your favourite youthful indulgence of a fried-egg sandwich with a layer of tomato ketchup inside it has reminded me of what Jim tells me was the best part of every school trip. Whereas I was used to taking a packed lunch with me to my school every day, Jim would only take his own lunch when a class outing had been planned, and would ask his mum to provide a Spam sandwich, the sliced bread having first been ketchupped.1

As if a Spam-and-ketchup filling weren’t enough of an affront to sandwich culture, Jim tells me that most of the kids – including him – would eat their packed lunch before the coach had even left school premises. What those tearaways then ate at lunchtime is anybody’s guess.2

🚌 Educational away days

Ahhhh, school trips! My classmates and I used to entertain ourselves with ‘music’ on long coach rides to places like Fishbourne Roman Palace, Hever Castle or Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. We’d begin the cacophony with a four-part round of ‘London’s Burning’, moving quickly on to ‘Found a Peanut’ and ‘One Man Went to Mow’, both of which could last for hours. My favourite, though, was this:

I’m sure it went on (and on and on and on…..) from there, but it will no doubt come as some relief to you that I don’t remember any more of it.

The song’s being going round in my own head, though, ever since this packet of meatballs arrived in a grocery order earlier this month:

The packet was sealed when this picture was taken, and when I peeled back the film to take a roll call, meatball attendance was recorded at just 95%. That’s right: the empty space represented a missing meatball, not one which had been hiding beneath the label.

Well, nineteen meatballs are still far too many make a perfectly decent nosh-up for two hungry people, so we didn’t starve.

🐌 Slooooooow food

Do you enjoy slow-cooked dishes, Terry? I came across a recipe from Mark Hix in the Telegraph recently which clearly takes the idea of the ‘slow food movement’ too far. Sure, good things come to those who wait, but no pudding should take this long!

Prep time 20 minutes, oh, plus months and months of steeping. Yeah, thanks.

I have another bone to pick with this recipe, too. ‘After entertaining, you often end up with random dregs of booze and no idea what to do with them’, Hix tells me.

Erm, no I don’t, and no I don’t. 🙄

🥕 It gets worse!

The long wait for rumtopf with rice pudding is perhaps less problematic than what came into my head after I’d spotted this headline in Friday’s Daily Mirror:

Carrots taste better when they’re not boiled and soaked in one 42p ingredient

Call me a cynic, but surely there are plenty of 42p ingredients in which to not soak your carrots in order that they will taste nice? With today’s UK average price being 134.4p per litre, I could, for instance, spend 42p on 312ml of petrol in which to soak my carrots, and I can absolutely guarantee that yes, my carrots would taste better if they’re not boiled and soaked in that stuff.

And Terry, I know what you’re thinking, but don’t be difficult. I know that petrol isn’t a common ingredient in cooking, but what makes an ingredient an ingredient is the intention of the cook to use it in a recipe. If I am daft enough to wish to include petrol in a dish I am making, then heck, it’s an ingredient.

🙄

Disclaimer: Don’t do this. Thank you.

🧩 The Puzzle Corner

Terry, I’m glad to report that I’ve solved your brain teaser!

‘Somewhere in this letter,’ you told me, ‘is an allusion to a Beatles song. What is the phrase in question, and which song does it come from?’

Ha! Well, you opened your third paragraph with the phrase ‘When I was younger, so much younger than today’, which is the opening line of HELP! by The Beatles.

I’ve got a short and sweet cryptic crossword clue for you in retaliation response. It’s from Saturday’s Daily Telegraph:

Six about to face unknown lady (3)

What’s the answer, and why?

📚 On reading

I’ve been doing a great deal of analogue reading recently, because I’ve been finding on-screen reading tiresomely tiring. It’s lovely to handle books, though, and it’s been rather a voyage of rediscovering that.

Anyway, I found this lovely passage in a book I’d picked up secondhand recently, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman:

I have always enjoyed reading, but I’ve never been sure how to select appropriate material. There are so many books in the world – how do you tell them all apart? How do you know which one will match your tastes and interests? That’s why I just pick the first book I see. There’s no point in trying to choose. The covers are of very little help, because they always only say good things, and I’ve found out to my cost that they’re rarely accurate. ‘Exhilarating.’ ‘Dazzling.’ ‘Hilarious’. No.

It's gorgeously ironic that I found the time I spent (two days straight) reading Eleanor Oliphant to be exhilarating, dazzling and hilarious, and I can thoroughly recommend the book. Perhaps next time I’m in a bookshop I shall pick up the first volume I come across – not to buy, necessarily, but to see what adopting the Eleanor Oliphant Method might reveal. Will it be a new discovery; the fulfilment of an unforeseen literary destiny?

Or rather, will it be something which my conscious brain would never allow me to consider? Like, for instance, a spam-and-ketchup sandwich… 🤔

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Musings on everyday happenings and conversations, book reviews, experiments in creative nonfiction writing, writing advice.

By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which as usual I read with relish.

🍳 Eggs

Your description of the letter’s contents right at top began ‘In which Terry ruminates on eggs’. You’re ruminating on eggs? According to the mid-century advertising campaign by the Egg Marketing Board the duty of a British citizen was to go to work on one!

Go to work on an egg was an advertising slogan used by the United Kingdom’s Egg Marketing Board during the 1950s and 1960s as part of more than £12 million1 it spent on advertising.

The proposition was that having an egg for breakfast was the best way to start the working day.

In 2007, plans to rebroadcast the original television adverts were rejected by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, which observed that the adverts did not suggest a varied diet.

Taken from Wikipedia.

🏘️ Meeting up

Jim and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming you and Elaine to our rural little East Sussex village recently. We’d invited you to join us on a day on which the closed-down secondhand bookshop would be open as part of its efforts to clear its stock after the owner’s retirement, and we all got so carried away that it was a good thing that I’d set an alarm to tell me when we needed to be heading back to the station for your journey home.

In fact, we picked up so many treasures at the bookshop that it’s a good thing we’re not afflicted by the condition I’d learned about in my attempts to answer the ‘Pub Quiz’ in the Saturday section of the Daily Telegraph on April 5, 2025.

Question:
Dreaded by avid readers, what does the Japanese term ‘tsundoku’ mean?

Answer:
Acquiring books (or other reading materials) and not reading them, letting them accumulate on bookshelves and the like.

Hang on a second… did I just say we are not afflicted by this condition? 🫣

As well as book browsing we’d promised you a tour of Jim’s photography studio in the centre of the village. Despite having spent some time in there it’s ironic that it had occurred to none of us – not even Jim, whose actual job it is to snap people and places – to take a picture to record our meet-up for posterity.

I was delighted, therefore, to have been sent your own portrait of us, which I’ve reproduced below with your kind permission.

The likenesses you’ve achieved are uncannily accurate, including, it seems, a true-to-form Rebecca eyeroll. Quite right, too: as most of us know, it’s my default expression.

🧩 The Puzzle Corner

I’ve had a go at both of your crossword clues, because hey, I appreciate a challenge.

The first was this:

Two girls, one on each knee (7)

This one was easy, but only because I’d seen it – and solved it! – before! Each of my knees has a kneecap – patella in Latin – and look, Pat and Ella are both girls’ names. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

I’ve struggled with your second clue, and wonder if perhaps you’d made a mistake with the number of letters in the solution?

Loose American women on the waters in East Anglia (7, 7)

I know that a US-English term for women of questionable repute is ‘broads’, and having spent a boating holiday on the waters in East Anglia with family as a teenager I wonder if the answer you’re looking for is Norfolk Broads? If so, you needed to have put 7, 6 into those brackets! If I’m off the mark, though, and you are looking for two seven-letter words, I’d love to know the correct answer.

Let me move swiftly on to present this from a recent edition of the Saturday Telegraph, one of only two clues I’ve managed so far to solve:

Animated roadmen notice returning Galaxy (9)

Let me know what you come up with!

🚂 Taking the slow train…

I’ve been meaning to ask how your journey back to London had gone after you’d seen us last week. I’m assuming you actually made it home? I thought of you a couple of days ago when I saw an advert for British Rail with this slogan:

200 years of train travel

An unkinder commentator than I might be tempted to say ‘yeah, that’s because it takes that long to get anywhere by rail these days’. If you and Elaine are not home yet, that’s nearly a fortnight, which is well on the way to two hundred years. You’re possibly already nearly a travel statistic! 😱

🙃 Foolish behaviour

Speaking of the passage of time, although it’s already the middle of April let me nevertheless take this belated opportunity to congratulate you on your excellent April Fools’ Day gag of a post which you’d published on the first of the month.

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life

How I reduced my marking time from 4 hours a week to 15 minutes

Some readers of this esteemed publication may be aware that I have recently finished teaching an online course in creative writing. Although the weekly session lasted only for 60 minutes, the students — all 14 of them — insisted on submitting a piece of work after each class…

Read more

a year ago · 17 likes · 37 comments · Terry Freedman

Terry, I actually believed you. 🙄 #sogullible

On April Fools’ Day I read several articles on Apple News about how disappointing it is that in today’s internet-driven media so few April Fools’ stories make it into printed newspapers, and having rifled through every publication in the Village Stores on the day in question I share in that disappointment. The only example I found was a story at the bottom of page 3 of the Daily Express about a theme park erecting signage to show that their rollercoasters were not suitable for vegetarians or vegans due to the risk of riders swallowing airborne insects. 🪰

Terry, you couldn’t make it up. Well, then again…. 😉

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest missive, which, as always, I enjoyed immensely.

🫵 Playing by the rules

In your letter you’d mentioned Shipman’s First Law of Action – a rule exercised by your father-in-law, of which the premise is ‘if you wait long enough, somebody else will do it’. Now, I’m all for conserving energy, and it’s fair enough to chance one’s arm now and again just to see if one can get away with not doing something, but when it becomes the life’s work ‘work’ 🙄 of a large proportion of society, well, that’s taking things too far.

I remember friends from school telling me that whenever they were asked to do something at home, such as the washing up or taking out the rubbish, they would deliberately carry out the task so very poorly that they’d never be troubled with having to do it again in the future.

Well, that was never wasn’t always the case in our house. Okay, we had our moments of trying to get out of our chores, sure, but we’d been brought up to do our jobs properly and with good grace. There’s no better practice for adult life than, well, practising it, but Terry, it was still annoying. I would enjoy baking cakes, but hated the clearing up afterwards.

But guess what? The rule was that if you weren’t going to do any of the clearing up, you didn’t get to make the cake. Easy!

I was intrigued by this headline I’d spotted online recently:

Dieticians answer your burning breakfast questions

I’ll tell you, Terry, the only question I’d be asking if I had the misfortune to burn my breakfast would be ‘where’s the fire extinguisher?’

Speaking of breakfast, the Village Stores had been unable to get hold of large free-range eggs from the farm last week, and had had to settle for a delivery of medium ones. Breakfast that first morning was a disappointment, and not just for me, but for my egg, which was considerably out of its depth:

I was able to cheer us both up by turning my egg cup upside down. Much better.

(After that minuscule excuse for a breakfast I certainly needed elevenses that day.)

Terry, I’ve solved that devious crossword clue you’d set me! It was an excellent challenge, and I loved adopting the puzzle-solving techniques I’ve been honing.

Here’s the clue you’d given me:

Beautiful girl in crimson revolted (8)

The word revolted would be an excellent indicator for an anagram, but there were no other eight-letter words or combination of words to supply the parts for that anagram. I needed to look deeper.

I started in the middle. In crimson might give me something. In a crossword clue, in can indicate a word being split into two and then something else inserted between them. So, I thought, what do I know about crimson?

Crimson is red. I could put something into the word red! I set about making a word sandwich. Here were my options:

R _ _ _ _ _ E D

or

R E _ _ _ _ _ D

Okay, so maybe I’ve got three of those eight letters. What about the other five?

Beautiful girl. Well, REBECCA didn’t fit, which upset me greatly. What else could it be?

Beauty and the beast, then. La Belle et la Bête. BELLE!

REBELLED

And yup, that’s another word for revolted! Ha!

😇

❓ Wrong words… or the right words in the wrong order?

Those instructions you’d found which recommended that you should drink water ‘continuously’ (meaning to do it without stopping) sounded both bonkers and entirely impractical. I’m glad to say I learned at an early age that continuous with an interval is continual. I’ve never forgotten that!

Word order can trip us up too, when it comes to working out what someone’s going on about. Mum sent me this lovely snippet she’d read last week:

Behind the sofa was a dog in a small cage which began leaping up and down, snarling and growling as J approached.

Is a cage capable of “leaping up and down, snarling and growling”? Maybe, if it had been an animatronic prop in a horror movie. If, however, it had been the dog leaping up and down, well, this would have been a better sentence:

Behind the sofa in a small cage was a dog which began leaping up and down, snarling and growling…

Pedant? Moi? Yup!

📚 The End

Terry, you and I have reached the end of a chapter! I don’t mean a chapter in our letter writing – of course not – but the end of a chapter in our pupil/teacher relationship. This week (well, yesterday, if you’re reading it when it’s published on Wednesday morning) is the last lesson in the online course The 60-minute writer which you’ve been teaching for the past eleven weeks, and I have to say that I have enjoyed the classes a great deal…

…and that’s in spite of your repeated demands on me to submit writing for assessment on a weekly basis:

Well now. Although it’s from a much-younger-than-me student to their school art teacher, I hope you know that I have enjoyed your classes just as much as the writer of this note which I’d spotted online had enjoyed theirs:

I’m glad that I hadn’t resorted to Shipman’s First Law of Action by relying on someone else to do my homework for me. 😇

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, in which the word count of your copious footnotes was an almost perfect match to that of the rest. Impressive!

I hope you’re feeling much better after your bout of illness. You’d been struggling for ages with the flu, and now it seems that it was more likely to have been Covid! You have my sympathies. I haven’t knowingly had Covid, and am hoping to continue my unbroken streak.

📝 My dog ate it

I enjoyed being a fly on the wall at your recent teaching evaluation. I’d been plotting to not submit my homework ahead of the inspection, using ‘the dog ate it’ as an excuse. As a non-pet-owner, sourcing a dog for the task had felt too much like hard work, so I resorted to the less time-consuming option of actually doing my homework.

You’re welcome.

That reminds me of a concert violinist friend of mine whose sheet music had blown out of the window of her top-floor city flat when she was practising on a breezy summer’s day. Her subsequent social media post read something like ‘The conductor is never going to believe me!’ 🤣

📰 Puzzling it out

Like you, I enjoy the Concise Crossword in the Daily Telegraph, especially for the solutions of those first clues which together sound like a well-known phrase. You’d given the examples Boulders; Brass (bold as brass) and Cycle; Logical (psychological), and the clues ‘A parrot (5)’ and ‘Venetian artist (6)’ in the one I completed this morning resulted in Polly; Titian (politician). Rather fun!

You’d voiced your surprise that I do the NYT crossword. Frankly, I’d be surprised to be doing the NYT crossword, because that’s way beyond my capabilities! In fact, I like the NYT’s mini crossword, which is a much more straightforward challenge unless it’s one with very US-specific clues.

On the flip side to that, I’m not sure that residents of anywhere other than Britain would stand a chance of solving the clever crossword clue which you’d set for me to solve!

Flightless bird found in Iceland (6, 7)

Okay, this took me a while. Penguin sprang to mind immediately – a flightless bird with seven letters – but of course the clue was cleverer than that.

I had a think about Iceland. It’s cold there, and – apart from the Galapagoan species of the birds – the northern hemisphere isn’t much of a stamping ground for penguins.

It finally occurred to me that Iceland is a well-known frozen food brand in the UK, so, Terry, the answer to your clue is frozen chicken. 😇

I loved the headline Live and let DIY – How many Gen Z-ers does it take to change a light bulb? which I’d spotted in a recent edition of the Saturday Telegraph magazine. It reminded me of a joke at my expense at my former place of work, in a hilarious welcome by colleagues on my return after a long spell of illness. I didn’t immediately understand why so few of the lights seemed to be on.

And then….

A colleague: ‘How many [company name] staff does it take to change a light bulb?’
All the rest of them: ‘One, and she’s off sick.’

You see, as well as doing my actual job I seemed to be responsible for a whole load of peripheral tasks – y’know, the kind of stuff that plenty of others might not think about, like replenishing the loo roll, emptying the bins, and other such glamorous stuff. Once, on arriving back at base from a business trip abroad, I found the coffee machine was missing.

‘Oh, it’s broken!’ I was told. ‘We’ve sent it off to be fixed.’

The machine arrived back a few days later with these words from the manufacturer’s service department:

‘The drawer for the used coffee grounds needs to be emptied regularly.’ 🙄

Oh, and back to that headline, how many Gen Z-ers does it take to change a light bulb?None. They get someone else to do it.

I’m Gen X.1 I rest my case.

📻 Audio adventures

In one of her recent posts, of wrote about her target of reading all of Agatha Christie’s novels in order. I’d never heard of one of Christie’s early works which Helen had mentioned, The Man in the Brown Suit, and was delighted to find the audiobook at my local library via the Libby app.

A story that is very different to Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot mysteries which I know so well, The Man in the Brown Suit is narrated by an intrepid young lady who is determined to unravel the mystery behind the death she’d witnessed of a man on the London Underground. The terrific adventure was read by the fabulous Emilia Fox, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Having grown up with spoken-word radio I love to have something to listen to, and these days I’m enjoying audiobooks more than ever. Recordings aren’t always perfect, though, and I sometimes find myself giggling at an unexpected style of pronunciation of a word or a mistake in the emphasis of a sentence.

For instance, I’d had to rewind the same part of The Man in the Brown Suit several times before I could understand exactly what was meant by

‘I applied my eye to the keyhole instead of my ear.’

When it’s written down like that it’s simple to understand – she’s looking, instead of listening, through the keyhole – but this is what I heard in the audio delivery:

Instead of:

Applying one’s eye to one’s own ear is, I’m certain of it, impossible.

Still, the book is superb, as is Emilia Fox’s reading of it. Five stars – and a giggle!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️😂

As I’d mentioned in the comments to your letter when you published it last week, I enjoyed reading your thoughts on age. ‘This will sound daft,’ you told me, ‘but I’m fascinated by the fact that I existed before some people, and that other people existed before me, and will exist after me. Do you experience this?’

Well, yes, and the older I get, the quicker time goes. I’m gunning for a rebranding of Generation X to Generation Just-Get-On-With-It-Before-it’s-too-Late.

I heard the following description of an elderly acquaintance recently, in an unintentional nod to Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop:2

‘She doesn’t really go any more – she’s very derelict.’

Ah, decrepitude gets to us all, I suppose. Shall we call it ‘the dereliction of youth’?

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

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Dear Terry,

Thanks for your latest letter!

Sorry, after all this time I doubt you even remember me. I’m Rebecca: the one who used to write you letters on a tight and predictable schedule of every other Wednesday but whose handle on timekeeping has loosened considerably since the start of the year.

I’d like to throw in the phrase ‘better late than never’, but I wonder whether you might judge me for this obvious reliance on cliché to make a point. At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, it’s an uphill battle writing to a teacher. Still, in the weekly course you’re teaching on Zoom you’re bringing ideas to the table, encouraging me and my fellow students to think outside the box…. and bringing home the fact that I don’t need to rely on such low-hanging fruit as the overcooked literary stereotype.

😉

Remember this deliciously clichéd soup of a post you’d cooked up a couple of years ago for your ‘Experiments in style’ series? Happy days….!

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life

Experiments in style: Cliché version

Introduction…

Read more

3 years ago · 14 likes · 20 comments · Terry Freedman

And I know you’ll enjoy reading between the lines of this article from the Saturday Evening Post, whose title, The 10 Silliest Clichés since Sliced Bread, absolutely takes the biscuit.

📋 On planning

I’ve always had a soft spot for Spike Milligan, doyen of dry wit whose self-penned epitaph on his Sussex gravestone – ‘I told you I was ill’ sums up his humour in just six words. His attitude to planning, which you’d shared with me in reference to your own feelings about making new year’s resolutions – ‘if you don’t make a plan, the plan can’t go wrong’ – is actually pretty sensible when it comes to the bigger stuff.

I get very lost if I don’t plan my must-do minutiae, in that every tiny job needs to be listed in my notebook in order that I won’t forget to do it, or that I can at least postpone it with intention using The Bullet Journal Method’s ‘task migration’ practice. It’s the bigger picture which I find so daunting to plan.

I can’t stand the headache of a large project, and I’ve always viewed new year’s resolutions as threats. Failure is pretty easy, even likely, so why should I spell out in advance to myself precisely what I’m going to fail at? Never mind ‘fail to plan: plan to fail’ – heck, I’ll head straight for ‘I’d rather not even try than risk failing, thanks’.

Oh blimey, Terry – at this rate that might become my epitaph. 🙄

🍳 Breakfast

I was wondering this morning what breakfast looks like in other people’s houses. No, not the menu, or the presentation, but how their morning routine might compare with my own. In our house, cups of tea need to be made and delivered to the bedroom first thing (preferably not by me), but perhaps other people go straight downstairs, fresh as those clichéd daisies, to brew coffee? And are there pets clamouring to be fed? Are they the wake-up call, rendering alarm clocks redundant? With no cats to paw me back to consciousness I rely on technology, but not having the follow-through of a hungry pet demanding the attention of a human with a tin-opener I’m afraid I’m rather too friendly with the ‘snooze’ button.

When I finally make it downstairs – after my cuppa, the NYT Mini Crossword, Wordle and Connections – it’s usually still dark, and I can get on with my kitchen chores in peace.

Yet on Sunday morning I arrived in the kitchen way later than usual, and it was already what passes for daylight for this time of year.

There was a one-bird queue at the back door; no, up against the back door. ‘Our’ blackbird lives the life of Riley down here – water bath cleaned and topped up on a daily basis, food delivered whenever we see he’s around – but Terry, he’s getting too big for his boots beak with his unreasonable demands.

Having not been fed at his usual time of early o’clock, thanks to my weekend lie-in, he was kicking up no end of a fuss. I watched him devour in moments the handful of dried mealworms I put out for him, and knowing that he’d only invite his annoying friends the starlings and jackdaws to join him if I put down any more I ignored him while I got on with making eggs and porridge.

He stuck around, squeaking his complaints at high Hertz. Have you ever heard a blackbird needing oiling, right up close? It’s not the world’s prettiest sound. I asked him sarcastically if he wanted to join me in a boiled egg (cannibalism? Infanticide?) or share Jim’s porridge (my preferred option), and I swear that he replied ‘No thanks: I’d like coffee, half a grapefruit with brown sugar and a warm croissant. Oh, and the Sunday Times to read. Would you iron it first, please?’

Thank the Lord I have neither children nor pets. The bird had to lump it in the end with a second handful of mealworms.

☕️ A cup of tea that was just my cup of tea

Jim and I broke the habit of a lifetime (how many clichés is that now?) by pausing at a diner on the bypass on our way home from a hospital appointment recently. It was American-themed, with its menu offerings of hamburgers, slaw, fries and milkshakes complemented very Britishly with the inclusion of this tempting phrase:

‘Builders’ tea’

Ah, Terry. Music to my ears, fuel to my flame, and exactly what the doctor ordered.

🧠 Clever clogs

You’ve earned zero points for your answer of ‘who knows?’ to the puzzle from BBC TV quiz Only Connect I’d shared in my last letter, but Sharron Bassano has earned this gold star ⭐️ for solving it absolutely perfectly.

Here’s another look:

What’s the connection between these four words?

Toyota
Sensuousness
Booby
Ananas

The answer – thanks, Sharron! – is that when the last letter of each word is moved to the front and the results are read backwards, the words are the same as the ones you’d started with.

Toyota ➡️ Atoyot ⬅️ Toyota
Sensuousness ➡️ Ssensuousnes ⬅️ Sensuousness
Booby ➡️ Yboob ⬅️ Booby
Ananas ➡️ Sanana ⬅️ Ananas

😁

🏎️ From A to B in the blink of an eye

Your video taken from the passenger seat when Elaine was driving was the most exciting car chase I’ve seen since The Italian Job! Wow, stick that on a big screen and audience adrenaline would hit the roof. I wonder if it would be even more impressive if you sped the footage up at all?

✏️ I’ll keep this brief

The latest class in the writing course I’m taking1 covered flash fiction, and in order to score extra points with my teacher I intend to cover everything I have to say in my next letter in just a hundred words.

This is likely to be a relief to many.

↻ Circling back to the start

Terry, it’s your turn to write next time: the ball’s back in your court. Oh, and here’s a writing tip for you: avoid clichés like the plague.

See you on the flip side! No, okay, enough already.

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which has launched the third year of our continuing correspondence with due ceremony! I’d missed you slightly during the Christmas break, and it’s nice to get back into our writing routine.

📚 New year, new number

2025, eh? Blimey, those numbers are racking up! There always seems to be a lot of pressure and expectation attached to the new year, doesn’t there? I mean, resolutions and new contracts-with-self to – I don’t know – join the gym, commit to a 365-day streak of running a daily 5k, and all those kinds of things. I felt much better about not setting any such expectations for myself when I spotted this on Apple News last week:

🏫 Starting school

Terry, I’m going back to school – which, of course, you know because you’re the one who’ll be teaching the course. Although I already learn such a lot from your relentless erudite content here on Substack I had decided to formalise this teacher/pupil relationship by signing up to ‘The 60-minute writer’ course which you’re teaching on Zoom for CityLit for the next eleven Tuesdays. I’ve been looking forward to it, and at the time you receive this letter the first session will have been accomplished!

✔️ Right… or wrong? ❌

Will you be admonishing your 60-minute students for using incorrect grammar or syntax, Terry? I’m sure not, but I wonder what you think of this for a sentence, which I found in a recent Daily Telegraph article about doner kebabs:

A true doner can only be made of chicken, lamb, or beef from a cow that is at least 18 months old and which has been marinated in yoghurt and herbs.

Now, if the beef is 18 months old, well, I identify that as a problem straight off the bat. And if it’s the cow that’s 18 months old, well, how long does one have to marinate the animal in the yoghurt and herbs? Presumably that happens in the field where the herd is grazing, in which case does the farmer need to remove acres of pasture in favour of seeding the ground with herbs, and cross his or her fingers that it’s going to be raining yoghurt? 🤔

Terry, it’s a worry. Am I missing something in the sentence structure here, or is this just really clever marketing on the part of the kebab industry?

🛍️ Is this even a selling point?

Marketing’s a minefield at the best of times. I spotted an advertorial on an online news site for an M&S jumper during the inevitable tidalwave of marketing material which was polluting my vision and getting in the way of real reports during the post-Christmas sales.

The headline was this:

Marks and Spencer’s £25 jumper is non-itchy and shoppers are buying in every colour.

‘Non-itchy’? Terry, I’d hardly call this a sales pitch! What’s next? ‘Socks without holes in’? ‘Raincoats which don’t leak’? 🙄

🔨 Multitasking with every tool at once

Jim was given a fabulous multitool for Christmas which incorporated the following gadgets:

• Pliers

• Wire cutters

• Saw

• Files

• Ruler

• Screwdrivers

• Knife

• Scissors

• Awl

• Can opener

It got me to thinking what I might like to see included in my own ideal multitool, and have come up with a shortlist of my own can’t-do-without apparatus:

• Kettle

• Teaspoon

• Immersion blender

• TV remote control

• Notebook

• Pen

• Spare pen

• Paring knife

• Tweezers

• Nail clippers

I’m not entirely sure that my mash-up of machinery would fit neatly in the one unit, never mind something which would fit into a handy pouch to wear on my belt, but hey, there might just be a bonkers inventor product designer reading this letter over your shoulder who could come up with the goods. Terry, I’m not going to rule it out!

🐐 A goat is a goat, surely? Or is it a GOAT?

I’m glad you’d given the definition of the GOAT acronym for those who might not know that it stands for Greatest of All Time. I’d never heard the term before watching an interview with Olympic gymnastics multimedallist Simone Biles last summer, in which she was being asked about the gold necklace of a goat she was wearing. I had to hit Google in the end to find out about how on earth the word ‘goat’ could mean anything other than a mammal of the caprine category, because I had no idea.

Yup, must be getting old.

🦠 Going viral

I’m not surprised that the Big Data Infographic you showed me had gone viral – it’s impressive. Here it is for anyone looking over our shoulders who might not have seen it in your letter to me:

‘Have you ever had anything go viral, apart from a cold?’ you asked me. Well, no, I don’t think so. In fact, I spurn most circumstances under which going viral could ever happen, and, much like a hand sanitiser, I prefer to cultivate a state that is antiviral. I mean, that’s just common sense.

For the sake of the world at large I hope the maniacal laugh which you’d so thoughtfully recklessly included in your letter does not go viral. Terry, I haven’t slept for a week. 👀

🧐 Joined-up thinking

Do you watch the BBC2 quiz show ‘Only Connect’? I hope not, because I’ve pinched one of the questions from the January 6th edition with which to confound you. Here goes:

What’s the connection between these four words?

Toyota
Sensuousness
Booby
Ananas

I look forward to your answer!

📚 Reading, not writing

As I said at the start of this letter – my first in 2025 – it’s nice to get back into a routine. Over Christmas I spent a great deal of time reading books, listening to audiobooks and making art. I didn’t spend much time at all either reading or writing on Substack.

I’ve recently finished the terrific Wintering by Katherine May, and have picked up two books again which I’d put on hold for a bit – artist Danny Gregory’s graphic memoir Everyday Matters, and Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch. I’m enjoying both immensely.

Seeking an adjunctive audiobook to enjoy alongside my hard-copy reading (although not simultaneously, because that would be bananas) I was scrolling through the Libby app last week and stumbled across the 18-hour recording Becoming by Michelle Obama, read by the author. Having been brought up on spoken-word radio – thank you, BBC Radio 4 🙌 – I’m used to having something to listen to whenever I’m doing chores, or just when I’m relaxing, and although listening to so many hours of a single work seemed a daunting prospect I’m absolutely hooked. The fact that I’d chosen Michelle Obama’s memoir was a bit of a surprise even to me, actually, given that I tend to seek out writing by travellers and adventurers, but Becoming is an absolutely terrific specimen of the genre, and I’m finding it absolutely fascinating.

One day, Terry, perhaps I’ll publish my own memoir. Personal narrative is my favourite kind of read, which I suppose is why I most enjoy writing that kind of thing. Between you and me – so please don’t tell the teacher – I’m hoping that the 60-minute writer course will perhaps expand my writing horizons to a little way beyond my own story.

D’you think it might?

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Musings on everyday happenings and conversations, book reviews, experiments in creative nonfiction writing, writing advice.

By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which as always I enjoyed immensely. It was a feast for all the senses, containing as it did not only the kind of erudite words to which I have become accustomed from your side of our enduring correspondence but art and music in spades!

Please congratulate Elaine on her terrific performance of Mendelssohn’s Scherzo number 60, opus 2 – not only is she an extremely accomplished musician but she has such confidence and presence at the piano. Bravo!

I was horrified to read your tale of woe about your former colleague’s five-hour journey on foot to work in severe weather only to be sent home again shortly after his arrival! There’s no sign of that kind of weather here right now, I’m glad to say, although one deceptively sunny day a couple of weeks ago was chilly enough to warrant donning gloves for my trip into the back garden to top up the bird baths.

As you can see it didn’t go to plan…

🦈 There’s something else in the water…

As you may already know I have a penchant for scary fish movies, and to my delight a couple of weekends ago I found a brand-new specimen of the genre – Something in the Water – on Netflix.

Terry, the dialogue was hilarious. Here’s my favourite exchange between two panic-stricken characters:

‘What kind of shark is that? A bitey one?’
‘I don’t know, I’m not the shark whisperer!’

👍 Left-handed learning

I love to learn new things, and I recently booked myself onto an hour-long Zoom class in brush lettering for left-handers. Handedness is something I’ve found that not every course provider will take into account, and when I was learning how to crochet a few years ago I had been thrilled to find an instructor on YouTube with an entire playlist of classes in which she was demonstrating the craft left-handed.

My experience with the left-handed lettering course was made immediately fabulous by the delivery of materials beforehand. I’m not sure that many right-handers even spot things like this, but have you ever noticed that pens and pencils are printed to display their branding the right way for right-handed users – which by default is upside-down for anyone left-handed trying to use it?

My friend and fellow leftie Mary B highlights this quirk by drawing pens this way round! Have a look at this post of hers to see what I mean!

Back on Zoom, the other course participants and I all opened our packets of materials on screen. I spotted the unexpected quirk in branding orientation straight away, and piped up ‘wow, you’ve even given us left-handed pens!’ to the tutor.

‘No, they’re the same pens we use for the right-handed brush lettering course!’ she told me.

‘But LOOK!’ I held the pen up to the screen.

I brush-lettered for the remaining 58 minutes of the class with a huge I-feel-so-loved smile on my face, and didn’t care how barmy I looked on screen. As for the pens themselves – well, they write quite nicely, don’t they?

I wonder whether participants on the right-handed brush lettering course have noticed that the branding on their pens is upside down? 🙃

*gloats*

📝 Planning

I enjoyed reading your paragraphs on planning, and might even use some of your methods myself! Thank you for the tips. 👍

I like to have a stash of ideas, stories and snippets to harvest, and jot down a note whenever I think of something I’d like to tell you about in a letter. When you publish a letter to me I pick a few topics of yours which I’d like to follow up on in my reply, and then, like you, I add things of my own.

You asked me this:

‘Do you spend ages mulling over every word in your letters to me, or do you bash the letter out and say “That’ll do”?’

Terry, don’t take offence but I’m noticing that I spend less time on writing these letters than I used to. 😉 However, this is not because I’m putting in any less effort, but because my writing confidence has grown over the time we have been corresponding, for which you deserve a great deal of the credit! Aside from that, as I’ve explained above, I have a plan for how to tackle each letter. 😇

📚 Reading

I’ve never read any Philip Roth but was interested in what you had to say about his use of free indirect speech in The Human Stain, the first book on the reading list for the course you’re enrolled on.

I’ve just finished reading an absolutely beautiful travel memoir, Boogie up the River, by Mark Wallington, a writer I had first come across thanks to Raynor Winn’s multiple references to its prequel, Five Hundred Mile Walkies, in her own fabulous read The Salt Path. Boogie isn’t a book I’d sought out, but when I was looking for a copy of Five Hundred Mile Walkies, which is out of print, I could only find a secondhand volume containing both. The unexpected bonus of Boogie up the River is a tale of a man and ‘his’ dog making their way to the source of the Thames in a Victorian skiff, and Terry, it’s an utter delight.

I enjoyed it because:

a) it’s very, very funny, ⬇️

Boogie isn’t my dog. Boogie isn’t anyone’s dog. Boogie is a freelance.

He was found abandoned as a puppy, and taken home to a darkened room in south London and fed crisps. There he grew up the hard way, a London mongrel, devious and streetwise with a strong sense of survival and little in common with other dogs. He would never fetch sticks, only hubcaps.

He came to stay with me in north London a while ago for a weekend and never left. I still don’t know how long he’s here for. We live our own lives, Boogie and me.

and b) the writing is terrific. ⬇️

The river felt thicker after the rain, and the sensation of being in the control of something powerful and inevitably grew stronger with each mile. The elixir-like flow drew all life to its banks. And not just wildlife – churches loved to hide in its recesses; the fine country houses that I passed were all possessive of their river views; the land and the farm stock all lurched towards the water for sustenance.

🎅🏼 Happy holidays!

Terry, I love a bit of festive music in the run-up to Christmas, and have been listening to Classic FM whenever I’m busy in the kitchen. I’ve always enjoyed singing carols – although enjoyment varies from limited to absent for anyone within earshot of my tuneless bellowing – and this across-the-decades duet of ‘O Holy Night’ sung by Aled Jones (treble) and Aled Jones (baritone) still always moves me to tears.

The radio presenter on one recent morning’s broadcast had been asking listeners for their suggestions for a collective noun for a group of Father Christmases.

Jim and I came up with these alliterative ideas:

• A stocking of Santas

• A sack of Santas

• A sleigh of Santas

Other listeners were far more clever:

• A ho, ho, host of Father Christmases

• A presence (presents!!!) of Father Christmases

• A contract of Santas – because of all the Clauses!

Speaking of festive excesses, of which a large group of Father Christmases is clearly an example, I discovered for the first time while doing the Saturday Telegraph’s quick crossword this week that ‘be on a diet’ is an anagram for ‘obedient’.

Well, Terry, I’ve never been great at doing what I’m told, and heck, it’s Christmas! Mince pie, anyone?

🎄

I wish you, Elaine, Willow, Minty and Mocha all the very best for the festive season, and I’m already looking forward to taking up the cudgels of correspondence with you anew in 2025!

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

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Dear Terry,

You haven’t heard from me for a bit – I’m sorry for not catching the postman last week!

Mind you, given the weather you can’t really blame me, can you? I mean, who gets up early when the weather looks like this?

Tuesday November 19

This had been the weather forecast:

An hour later came this news of extreme weather having hit less than 200 miles away:

Wednesday November 20

Next morning got a lot colder here, which wasn’t wonderful, but just look at the early morning light over the South Downs and the frost in the field! Now, that was something beautiful to be faced with when I opened the curtains.

Two hours later, with no warning whatsoever (‘sunny and light winds’, yeah right), came this:

Terry, I can’t keep up with it. 🙄

I thought I’d remind myself of how I like to react to what Mother Nature likes to throw at us.

A British Person’s Assessment of the Weather

☀️ Sunshine (temperature <25°C)
I’m going to BURN.

🥵 Heatwave (>25°C)
I need an ice bath.

🔥 Heatwave (>30°C)
I doubt I’ll survive.

🌧️ Rain (any volume higher than drizzle)
It’s coming down in torrents out there.

🌬️ Breezy enough to make leaves move
Wow, it’s blowing a hoolie.

🌪️ Properly windy
I can’t leave the house for fear of falling trees.

🧊 Frost (any level)
I can’t get the car out.

❄️ Snow (light flakes)
IT’S SNOWING! 🤪 Wonder if the trains are running? #hopenot

❄️❄️ Snow (settling on the ground to a depth of <1 inch)
Gonna ring work to say I might not be in. 😉

❄️❄️❄️ Snow (settling on the ground to a depth of >1 inch)
CAN’T GET TO WORK! 🙌 GONNA MAKE A SNOWMAN! ☃️

❄️💧 Snow (no longer falling)
I HATE this stuff. 😫 Cold, wet, massively overrated. 🥶
And the trains aren’t running. 🙄

🐈‍⬛ Good news!

I was so glad to read your report in your last letter that Minty is back at home with the rest of the family. I hope that she’s now full of beans and enjoying getting into scrapes with her brother and sister.

🛒 Shopping

Your section heading ‘Big Brother is watching your shopping’ fair gave me the chills! When I used to shop at the supermarket I used to have to brace myself at the checkouts to await the discount vouchers targeted at my demographic. Most – aimed at a woman of childbearing age (okay, this was a while ago) – would make me shudder. No, I don’t need half-price dinosaur-shaped ‘meat’ slices for my non-existent little darlings’ lunchboxes, nor a bundle deal on school uniform. Instead I’d welcome money off brassicas for the entire season and a BOGOF on Mr Snaps’ favourite coffee, thanks.

These days it’s even worse: loyalty cards have gone rogue. I don’t have a Tesco Clubcard, as I choose to shop with another grocery supplier online, but I popped into our local branch of the brand – the nation’s largest grocery retailer – a while back to procure a couple of packets of the favourite snack of our building contractors. Guess what? A box of Cadbury’s Fingers is £1.00 for Clubcard holders but £1.90 for the rest of us. 😲

Pfffff. Gimme transparent pricing! The price is the price, right? Golly, if the lovely people at the Village Stores started to play this kind of trick I’d relocate immediately.

🗃️ Keeping track of writing

I learned a great deal from the Bits and pieces section of your letter, in which you’d shared four methods you use to store articles, quotes and ideas which you might one day like to use in your writing.

I loved the sound of Wakelet, ‘the all in one content platform’ in which one can ‘bookmark, organize, collaborate and present all under one roof’, but I feel that this kind of online set-up might just propel me over the line into overwhelm. My own storage-cum-recall method relies on a handwritten record of things I’d like to be able to find in the future, in the form of a note on a dated page of my writing log.

Each might contain the following:

• A keyword to represent a subject I’d like to write about one day, along with the page number/s of my pocket notebook where I might have scribbled down some notes about it;

• The subject and source of an online article which I’ve e-mailed to myself and saved in my mail program’s ‘Writing’ folder;

• The subject and date of any paper articles which I’ve cut out from the newspaper and stored in a box file;

• A note of any Substack posts I’d like to link to in one of my own posts.

Plenty of pages in my writing log contain lists headed ‘LTT’ – for Letters to Terry – and here’s a snap of one from mid-October so that you can see what I’m on about:

Whenever I sit down to write my latest Letter to Terry, then, I know I’ve always got reference points at my fingertips.

💡 Ideas

That leads me on to your next question, which was ‘How do you write your articles? I mean, where do you get your ideas from?’

You’d told me that your approach is this:

I am often sparked off by some piece of news or a street sign, but even more frequently by my own imagination, drawing on my experiences and the people I’ve come across.

Well, I’m the same!

I often have three or four posts in mind at a time, depending on what’s caught my attention recently, and when I’m embarking on drafting my next Saturday post I will know which one or two I want to think about exploring, and which two or three to mothball for a future week. Some subjects are seasonal – for instance, this year I have written about marmalade-making in Seville orange season, asparagus in spring and the sheer joy of wearing socks printed with a milestone age at around the time of my birthday – but others I will write about just because those are what I want to write about.

Did I ever think I’d be writing about crisps and whether it should be compulsory for those of a cheese-and-onion persuasion to only ever be presented in green packaging, or indeed that I’d feel compelled to voice my frustration in a post that campsite showers don’t cater for the tall?

Nope. Not until I did!

📚 Trouble at the library

I enjoyed your tale of woe about the pre-overdue notice which you’d received from the library sending you on a wild-goose chase for a book which it turned out you’d borrowed in electronic format rather than hard copy.

‘There you have it, Becks’, you announced. ‘I HAD BEEN SEARCHING FOR A NON-EXISTENT BOOK.’

The overdue notice you’d mentioned reminded me of an entry I’d made in my writing log. I found a note I’d made on October 21 – Guardian, 113-yrs overdue book – and unearthed both a screenshot in my Photos app and a link to the article which I’d e-mailed to myself.

See, Terry, the system works. ✔️

Here’s the article, which tells of a book of Byron’s poems borrowed by young Leonard Ewbank in 1911 which was only returned to the library last month.

I’ve been enjoying harvesting silly newspaper headlines, amusingly incorrect choices of vocabulary and specimens of downright daftness. Since I last wrote to you I’ve found these to share:

‘Confident’ seafront toilets will stay, says leader.
Ah yes, now confidence counts for a lot. Mind you, I fear the days of the ‘timid’ seafront toilets must be numbered….

A vocabulary anomaly I’d spotted online:

‘It’s a process of illumination.’
I love this, Terry! 💡

Overheard while out and about:

‘….erroneous zones.’
‘Don’t you mean ‘erogenous’?’
‘I dunno, do I?’

🤣

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

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An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

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Dear Terry,

Thank you for your recent letter, which as usual was a delight to read.

Much less of a delight to receive last week had been this e-mail from my grocery delivery provider:

‘Your home wants a good ‘ol clean’ declared the subject line. Terry, I took offence immediately; I mean, the CHEEK of the people! And how did they know? 🫣 I had wondered whether to send them a pithy response but thought better of it, in case they are keeping tabs on the state of Holden Heights. What if they’re actually monitoring the volume of dust I sweep under the mat on a daily weekly monthly occasional basis? I mean hey, we’re busy people, but in my home-cleaning routine1 I do at least try to keep on top of the bits that show!

🧼 Good clean fun

Cleaning is important, though, and according to this bottle of liquid soap, it can PAY!

Half price entry ‘with this pack’? Terry, I have my doubts as to whether it’s altogether sensible for the promotors to encourage visitors who are brandishing liquid soap to the two theme parks and the national chain of aquariums whose logos are shown on the label. Riding a rollercoaster is scary enough without slippery soap sliding everywhere, and sodium laureth sulphate2 and fish tanks do not mix. Well, they do, but not, I imagine, in a happy way for the fish.

🫣

🌧️ Enjoying the weather

In a recent post I’d written a little about a super book I’m reading, 500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington, in which the author, having borrowed the necessary equipment and a dog, tells his story of hiking the South West Coast Path with canine company. I’m finding it a compelling and hilarious read, and I’d like to share this snippet about the weather in out-of-season St Ives, which is rather better known for being a sunny summer tourist trap:

There was talk of sunny periods, but this was just a rumour spread by landladies. Instead… a bank of cloud rolled silently into town. It was the colour of a bruise and as welcome in the bay as Jaws. Only one thing for it: an early lunch. I bought a couple of Scotch eggs… and took shelter in an alcove opposite the Gents.

Taken from 500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington, published by Arrow in 1986.

🔮 The trouble with the forecast

On the subject of weather I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to paying attention to the forecast. In fact, I’d go further: I have such a mental block about it that I’d categorise my aptitude – even after watching the weather bulletin – for knowing what Mother Nature might chuck our way in the same column as my ability to work out which direction is north south east west home.

Terry, that might be why I didn’t even notice the anomaly in the screenshot from the BBC Weather app which Jim showed me recently, which was something so out-of-the-ordinary that the story made the national news for a couple of days afterwards.

If you look closely at the black circles you’ll see that the wind speed in Edinburgh was showing as 17,246mph, with Nottingham and New Delhi not far behind. And they call those ‘hurricane force’. Okaaaaaaay….. 👀

💰 Monopoly

I was horrified interested to read your account of the Monopoly game you had played with four students, each of them representing a different economic class. For the purposes of the game, you explained, one player was designated lower middle class, one had inherited wealth and one was upper middle class, with property and the means to buy it apportioned appropriately to each. The fourth player, representing the unemployed, was given no means to achieve property ownership, his only recourse to funds being passing Go and collecting £200, which was of course then spent on paying rent to the owners of the properties on which he landed on his next circuit of the board.

Your concluding sentence of the paragraph began thus:

‘After a while he became so angry that he got hold of the board and threw it across the room….’

Well, Terry, no wonder. I hope it was you who tidied up the mess, and that at the very least you offered the boy a stiff drink cup of tea and an apology.

📰 Clipping snippets

Terry, how do you keep track of the things you’d like to write about? I have my writing log, which is a book, and in it I record any snippets I collect, whether they’re screenshots, electronic articles or newspaper cuttings, the theory being that I’ll know where to find them. 🤣 ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

The stack of cuttings on my desk had been threatening to turn into yet another pile of denial until I had the bright idea last week of storing them in an old writing case which I’d picked up on eBay. I say ‘bright idea’ but well, it’s now just a pile of denial in slightly more attractive clothing.

When I read A Curious Career, a compelling and highly-entertaining memoir by newspaper feature writer Lynn Barber about the many celebrity interviews she has conducted, I had been struck by this passage:

I used to love getting… yellowing cuttings from the Tasiemka Archive… Edda Tasiemka, a German émigrée, used to help her journalist husband by cutting out articles she thought might be useful for him. When he died she went on cutting out articles till her entire house was crammed floor to ceiling… with bulging brown files. She’s still doing it, aged ninety, but alas now editors balk at paying her fees and say you can find it all on the internet. You can’t, actually. You can’t hold in your hands the actual Sun front page that screamed ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ whereas you can at Mrs Tasiemka’s. I still sometimes go round to her house just for the joy of riffling through old cuttings.

Taken from A Curious Career by Lynn Barber, published by Bloomsbury in 2014.

I wonder if anyone will ever riffle through cuttings of my writing, Terry? Well, a girl can dream….

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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To those reading this letter to Terry over my shoulder: although I didn’t bring you a Saturday post last week I am hoping that normal service will resume soon. You’re very kind to bear with me. Thank you. ❤️

If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you!

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

Dear Reader, I'm lost

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

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Dear Terry,

Thank you for your most recent missive, in which you showed me – and all of those reading our correspondence over our shoulders – quite what the party animal you are! Happy jolly ‘birthday’ to us both on the publication of my 21st letter to you this year!

🙄 Twenty-one again? I wish…

Sigh. My fiftieth birthday looms large on the horizon, and despite my dodgy mathematical ability I have nevertheless been able to calculate that my own twenty-first happened well over twenty-one years ago. I hope you’re impressed.

There will now be a short break to this letter while I have a snooze.
(Y’know, because age.)

🏆 Winning is not the name of the game

I sympathise with you for your family’s decision to bar you from the position of banker whenever you played Monopoly. Although I’m considered extremely competitive where it comes to board games, I maintain that I am misunderstood. You see, I’m not ever trying to beat anybody, but am simply desperate not to fail. I don’t think my past opponents have ever appreciated the difference!

✒️ Six-word reviews

In an e-mail to you I’d expressed my frustration at being unable to identify the title of the book which you’ve reviewed in these six words:

They dictate, but they can’t write!

Terry, I had no idea. Here’s what I told you:

I have NO clue what you’ve reviewed - I’m wondering if it’s perhaps a book about more than one illiterate autocrat? 🤔 Unlikely. I’ll keep trying!

Under the pretext of being helpful – an impression you spoiled by adding the word ‘Snigger’ to the end of your e-mail – you sent me a picture of a bookcase bursting at the seams. In fact, it was your own bookcase.

‘You may find the answer to my 6-word review here’, you assured me.

After scanning a diverse range of titles on shelves which were packed impressively two-deep my eyes landed on Dictator Literature by Daniel Kalder. I wondered if that could be it? I hit Google to find out more about the book, and realised the significance of the latter half of your six-word review: ‘…they can’t write’.

Here’s what Amazon had to say:

What do [books by dictators] reveal about their authors, the worst people imaginable? And how did they shape twentieth-century history? To find out, Daniel Kalder read them all – the badly written and the astonishingly badly written – so that you don’t have to. This is the untold history of books so terrible they should have been crimes.

Terry, I rest my case. Thank you for the challenge – and of course for the picture clue!

🍔 + 🔵 = 🤯 SHOULD food be blue?

You recounted in your letter the alarming story of a friend of yours at university with a penchant for dyeing blue everything which he cooked. In answer to your question, no, I’ve come across neither blue tomato soup nor blue mashed potatoes in my own gastronomic experience, but you’ve reminded me of a terrific scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary. The film’s heroine is holding a dinner party for her friends, and in her vain search for string to bind celery and leeks together for the soup she finds only….. well, you can see the results for yourself in the two clips below. The first is 13 seconds long, the second is 16.

Yum. 🫣

📰 Read all about it!

I both groaned and giggled at the punny funny newspaper headlines you shared, particularly Orange growers squeezed by rising costs. I came across a Daily Telegraph headline earlier this month along similar lines:

Drizzle of hope for shoppers as end of drought cuts olive oil price

Genius sub-editing!

I enjoyed the examples of ‘tabloidese’ which you’d extracted from Keith Waterhouse’s book On Newspaper Style.

Annoyance becomes outrage
Bad luck becomes jinx
Criticise becomes slam
Disagreement becomes clash

I wonder if you might one day use tabloidese as the modifier in one of your Oulipian ‘Experiments in Style’ posts? I’ve just pinched a line from your last letter and given it the relevant treatment. What do you think?

Original:
I made the mistake once of accepting my friend’s offer of a cup of tea.

My attempt at tabloidese:
I blundered once by giving my thumbs-up to a crony foisting a cup of tea on me.

🧑‍🍳 Cooking and shopping for groceries

Speaking of things to consume, are you ever tempted to follow any recipes you see online? One I saw recently for a microwaved chocolate mug cake was illustrated by a downright dangerous-looking photograph.

That mug looks to me like enamelled metal, risking both fire and the need to replace the microwave! Bon 🔥 appetit. 👀

🦄 Fantasy food and zoological ingredients 🐅

I am thrilled that your associate Lord Dunabunk saw fit to write to the powers-that-be about the dubious decision to market those unicorn slices I’d showed you. I wonder if Lord D might feel rather better about another product I spotted recently on my online grocery provider’s website? I’m glad that unlike those poor sliced unicorns at least the tigers are safe.

🌧️ British weather

What’s the London weather like at the moment? Last week saw us put the central heating on for the first time since spring, and oh boy, now that it’s warmed up a bit here comes the October rain. Jim was away on a shoot last week, and both he and the van got soggy feet. Here’s what he sent me:

Keep warm! And dry! And writing!

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published on Saturday.

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

Dear Reader, I'm lost

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

Read more

3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Musings on everyday happenings and conversations, book reviews, experiments in creative nonfiction writing, writing advice.

By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Thank you for your most recent missive, in which you pointed out that we’d reached the twentieth pair of letters in this series!

Like you I thoroughly enjoy our correspondence, and find new things to think about, have a giggle over or simply look at every time the e-postman delivers another of your epistles. Keep ’em coming! 📨

👦🏻 On identifying as a 25-year-old

It seems you agree with me that those appointed to positions of authority – police officers, politicians and the like – are getting younger. I was interested to learn that you ‘identify as a 25-year-old’, and have been wondering, well, which one? Trying to narrow down the field as to with whom you might most identify, I Googled ‘famous 25-year-olds’, and found in the results served up by famousbirthdays.com that I recognised absolutely NOBODY. Is that a symptom of my being old, I wonder?

That’s a rhetorical question, Terry. Please don’t hurt my feelings. 😉

(For the record, I identify as a person soon to leave her forties behind forever.)

🤪 Crossword insanity

Your section title, which I’ve reproduced above, is very well chosen; the phrase summed up perfectly both by your declaration that you ‘really do enjoy the type that features clues like this’ followed by your subsequent listing of the most incomprehensible challenges ever devised by a crossword setter. 🙄

❓ Too much choice

Ah yes, the ‘upselling’ approach by café staff does rather pall sometimes. Your unfulfilled desire for a jacket potato with cheese almost broke my heart! Although I admire the waiter’s attempts to get you to accept either beans or his signature homemade sauce I feel that his insistence on moving on to describe his whole range of available smoothies when you’d already declined any smoothie at all lands waaaay over the line marked ‘trying too hard’.

I sometimes find myself on the wrong side of menu writers in restaurants, and, where side orders are concerned, it can be a struggle to identify exactly what might arrive in response to my order. At one restaurant recently I was delighted to see ‘leafy green vegetables’ listed as an option.

‘Oh, and I’ll have the leafy green vegetables with my fish, please!’ I stated gaily to the friendly waiter. 🥦

In the fullness of time my sea bass was delivered to our table, together with a dish of peas. 🙄

Green ✔️
Leafy ❌

Of course, green veg comes in many shades of green. A chef’s suggestions for how home cooks might preserve its vibrancy stretched to three paragraphs in this article which I spotted a couple of weeks ago, but to my relief he concluded his exploration with these fine words:

One thing everyone agrees on, though, is that vegetables shouldn’t be cooked for too long.
Yotam Ottolenghi

Exactly!

When I was a teenager I was at a friend’s house for dinner. Pans had been bubbling for ages and ages and ages and ages in the steam-filled kitchen, and when in due course we took our seats at the dining table I was passed a dish containing a large number of tiny, bright-green leaves from which to serve myself.

‘Ooooh, this looks lovely!’ I smiled. ‘What is it?’

‘Brussels sprouts’ was the reply.

Research later revealed to me that the addition of bicarbonate of soda to the water in which veg is to be cooked will preserve the vibrancy of its colour, even when it is boiled FOR HOURS to a state of severed-leaf dismemberment.

😲

Gamesmanship

Hacking the colour of Mother Nature’s best then boiling it to death didn’t impress me, Terry, although I was bowled over by your account of how you’d hacked the computer game you were playing with your nephew. Sounds like you’d got your comeuppance when he figured out how to manipulate the game’s code for his own ends in retaliation. It jolly well serves you right!

When I was seven or eight I played ‘Top Trumps’ with a boy rather older than me. The subject of the game was military weaponry, and after he’d dealt the cards my opponent told me that he wanted to restrict our play to just one of the listed categories.

‘I’ll play you on Range’, he said.

‘Okay!’ It was fine by me that he was in charge.

The range of some of the weapons was mere feet, while for others it was miles. Some of my cards showed weapons with extraordinary spec, and I had high hopes of winning.

Turns out that one of the boy’s cards had ‘Infinity’ in the row for ‘Range’ – a fact he’d ascertained before announcing the terms of our game – and his eventual win had been inevitable. What can I say, Terry? I’ve always been gullible.

🦄 Gullible enough to buy these, though?

Wow, my online grocery shopping activities have taught me something. Terry, not only do unicorns exist but they’re also available sliced. 🤯

✏️ Six-word reviews

I’m glad to say that I’ve worked out both book titles represented by your six-word reviews. You’d told me that the two were related, so once I’d solved the more obvious one, the other was straightforward. Here they are, along with my answers:

Not 1948, though it almost was!
1984 by George Orwell.

Test tube babies, drugged up workers.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Although I’ve only read one of them – 1984 – I know that both are dystopian fiction. That’s the connection.

Right, I’ve got two for you. Like yours, mine are related, and they’re both books and films.

‘Jury’ justice off the rails. Retribution.

And:

Cruisers encounter crime chaos. Christie caper!

👨‍⚕️ (In)appropriate names for professional people

I had to giggle recently when I was told that my forthcoming medical appointment would be with Dr Payne, and I wondered whether I ought to take a couple of paracetamol before going to see him, just in case. 💊💊

I discovered in this Guardian article about nominative determinism – the idea that a person’s name can influence their choices – that my doctor being called ‘Payne’ is an example of an ‘aptronym’. Here’s the story’s headline and subtitle:

Examples given in the article include writers William Wordsworth and Francine Prose, and conductor and pianist David Loud. Have a read – I think you’ll find it interesting!

Speaking of reading, I’ve now finished Bill Bryson’s absolute hoot of a travel memoir ‘Neither Here nor There’, and have temporarily switched my attention from books to the required reading for an online taster course at CityLit called ‘Writings on Solitude’.

The topic has reminded me of this superb post of yours last summer entitled Solitude and isolation: a discussion with myself, which you’d written as a contribution to ’ symposium on isolation. Well, it seems I’m exploring solitude myself right now! I shall report back.

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life

Solitude and isolation

This article was written as a contribution to the Soaring Twenties (STSC) Symposium. This month’s Symposium theme is “isolation.” The STSC is a group of creatives who write, paint, versify and experiment their way through life. Join us…

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3 years ago · 50 likes · 103 comments · Terry Freedman

🧩 The last part of this letter the puzzle

Terry, I’m going to leave you with one of my favourite recent headlines from The Daily Telegraph:

The world jigsaw championships left me in pieces

🤣

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published on Saturday.

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

Dear Reader, I'm lost

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

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By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Thank you for your latest letter. I had to lie down in a darkened room after reading your descriptions of the Listener crossword and its evil colleague, the Enigmatic Variations. Have a heart, Terry – there’s no way I’m going to tackle – let alone conquer! – a puzzle in which I have to ‘enter the letters in a jumbled-up order’, nor ‘decode or encrypt the answer’!

🤯

🧩 Cubic capacity

I was impressed by your statement that you’d always wondered if people who solved the Rubik’s Cube simply took it apart and reassembled it when nobody was looking. I’m still smarting from my own childhood gullibility in not realising that dissembling and reassembling it was not only possible, but was also exactly the trick my parents would employ in order to fix my cube for me in secret!

Turns out that a youngster in Belfast is smarter than the lot of us, and has built and programmed a robot which can solve a Rubik’s Cube by itself – and not by taking it apart. 13-year-old Ruarcc’s creation ‘uses 5,000 lines of Python code and can solve the puzzle from any pre-set variation using colour sensors’.

Awesome!

👦🏻 Some thoughts on youth

Inventors, scientists and Rubik’s Cube geniuses are getting younger all the time. As someone nearing the end of her fiftieth year it’s been apparent to me for a while that everyone is suddenly younger than me, and even sporting retirees are getting in on the act!

In an article for the New York Times in May 2024 – one with the gee-thanks title When Age Catches Up to a Tennis Player – Stuart Miller wrote the following about ‘tennis mortals’ Andy Murray,1 Stan Wawrinka and Marin Cilic, among others:

These players still scuffle along in reduced circumstances, far lower in the rankings than during their halcyon days. These old men of the court — all 34 to 39 years old — win a few matches here and there without much chance of regaining their former glory, yet they keep grinding.

‘Old men of the court’? Charming! 🙄

Terry, I’m astonished that the people born early in this century are already well into adulthood, perhaps with families and grown-up jobs. And it’s not only teachers, doctors and policeman who are getting younger: two of our most recent three Prime Ministers were born after I was. I’m sure that when I was growing up every single politician I saw on the news was at least 150 years old. And now? Britain’s youngest MP is 22! 🤯

✏️ Six-word reviews

I have to admit that at first I had struggled to identify the title of the last film you reviewed. Here it is:

🎬 Possibly prescient prognosis? Don’t trust Harry!

Luckily, I spotted this clue which you’d given to in the comments:

Okay, so SF is science fiction - although I’ve only ever seen ‘science fiction’ abbreviated to sci-fi – and an abbreviated version of Harry? Hmmm. Well, Harry is itself a nickname for Henry, and the future Henry V is referred to as Prince Hal all the way through Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts I and II, so…..

Harry = Hal! And HAL is of course the name of the computer in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Phew! 😰

And I thought we were doing film reviews in order to save a bit of the brain power we’d been using up by trying to solve each other’s cripplingly cryptic crossword clues!

Right, my turn! Jim found a film in my favourite sub-genre with which to indulge me over the weekend. Here’s my review:

🎬 Gallic panic: city triathletes’ toothy terror.

📺 So many channels, but still there’s nothing on…

I agree with your comment that it’s hard these days to find something decent to watch; in fact, I often feel hobbled by the sheer volume of what’s on offer. Scrolling through the streaming apps is rather like being presented with a restaurant menu listing all my favourite foods but with no attached intelligence to take my preferences of the moment into account.

Full English breakfast? Yes please, but not this evening.
Fillet steak with peppercorn sauce? Sure, sometime, but I’m not in the mood for it right now.
8-course tasting menu from my favourite restaurant, complete with wine flight? NO, because it’s not my birthday!
Pleeeeease just give me a ham salad!

Still, we’re enjoying the over-the-top ‘hackjacking’ thriller Nightsleeper on BBC iPlayer at the moment. It’s an unlikely (I hope it’s unlikely!) story of a train whose controls have been taken over by cyberthugs, and I’m on the edge of my seat. I read a highly entertaining Guardian write-up of it with this subtitle:

I’m not linking the review here because of plot spoilers. But Terry, do try it – it’s terrific telly!

Well, you’ve just about finished reading this specimen of my crazy correspondence, so in conclusion I shall end it with this letter written to the editor of the Daily Telegraph by a Richard Kornicki of London W5, in response to a comment on ‘management gobblegook’:

Some years ago, while working at the Home Office, I amused myself by sending colleagues the following mission statement: “We are committed to delivering world-class cross-sectoral outcomes, driven by the pursuit of excellence in developing green-field opportunities through blue-sky thinking, by empowering our staff in a meaningful partnership relationship with stakeholders and customers to achieve a 21st-century community interface.”

I was shocked that nobody realised it was a parody containing not one shred of substantive meaning.

It reminded me of this fabulous post of yours, part of your ‘Experiments in style’ series:

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life

Experiments in style: the corporate statement version

Introduction…

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3 years ago · 12 likes · 24 comments · Terry Freedman

Terry, as always I look forward to reading some more of your own shreds of substantive meaning next week. 😉

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published on Saturday.

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

Dear Reader, I'm lost

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

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Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Musings on everyday happenings and conversations, book reviews, experiments in creative nonfiction writing, writing advice.

By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

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Dear Terry,

Thank you for your recent letter, in which you had omitted the expressions ‘Typical’ and ‘I know my rights’, and asked me to work out where I think you should have put them. An impossible task, I’m afraid. These days I am so familiar with your writing that even when reading fast I see those two expressions at least twice in every one of your sentences, whether they are present or not.

👦🏻 Your new image

I like your ‘new’ profile picture, Terry (deliberate inverted commas, as it is clearly taken from the archives). Do you remember the ‘Just William’ books by Richmal Crompton? Well, you resemble Thomas Henry’s terrific cover illustration, although I’m glad to see that 8-year-old Terry looks rather less unkempt than the 11-year-old ‘outlaw’ of Crompton’s stories.

I would encourage you – and anyone else reading this letter over our shoulders – to have a look at this Wikipedia entry for Just William. Your resemblance to the illustration is uncanny!

💡 Clever names for clue setters

I appreciate your review of the crossword clue I’d sent you last time, and grudgingly accept acknowledge the reasons you have given for it not being the zenith of clue setting I had felt it had represented.

I was very interested to read about the names which crossword setters give themselves: you’d shared the examples Ximenes and Azed. The delightful chap responsible for compiling the crossword in our parish magazine was called Tribulare, and your letter has prompted me to look up what this Latin word means.

It turns out that tribulare is the inflected form of the verb tribulo, meaning ‘to exact dues or payment’, ‘to press or squeeze’, or ‘to trouble’, making it a fitting name for the writer of such challenging clues. I thoroughly enjoyed his crossword every month – but never managed to finish it!

🤯 Cube conundrum

I’ve been having a think as to why I enjoy tackling crosswords so much, even though I’m not terribly accomplished at solving them. I think I enjoy 2D ‘thinking’ puzzles rather than the inconvenience of an object to scratch my head with (metaphorically, I mean – I don’t actually scratch my head with the object, because that would just be silly).

When I was a child my brother and I were each given a Rubik’s Cube, and in no time at all I had turned the perfect sides of mine into an untidy mess of colours in all the wrong places. As you know, I enjoy order, not chaos, and, well, I’d wrecked the thing immediately.

I took it to show Mum and Dad. ‘It’s broken. I can’t do it. Can you?’ Some thoughtful head-scratching ensued. ‘Well, we could have a go, I suppose,’ said Dad, ‘but I expect it’ll take both of us a very, very long time.

Early next morning1 I found my Rubik’s Cube in perfect condition on the shelf at the top of the stairs.

‘Thank you!’ I gasped, as I went into my parents’ bedroom.

A few comments were made about the very late night they’d both had, trying every combination of move to get all of those coloured squares back into the correct formation. I was on my best behaviour for at least half a day, conscious of how very tired they must be after that long task.

💤

A friend at university was an absolute wizard at the Cube, and would always have his with him, impressing everyone with how quickly he could return it to six sides of solid colour.

‘My parents were brilliant at this!’ I told him that they would always fix mine, and that they’d stay up all night to do it.

He stared at me, then nudged a corner piece upwards with his thumb, separating it from the body of the cube.

‘What are you doing?’ I was horrified.

Within seconds he had a pile of parts in front of him, and no sooner had he finished dismantling the cube than it was back together again with six perfect sides.

‘Hate to tell you this, Rebecca…’ he said slowly.

🙄

✏️ Six-word reviews

Terry, you and I have – to my considerable relief – agreed to leave to one side our habit of flinging ever-more complicated cryptic crossword clues at each other, and to share six-word reviews of books and films instead.

This came about as a result of the fabulous challenge which you’d set for readers of , and this follow-up post, in which you shared the results.

Well, Jim’s come up with this terrific review of a 1975 Spielberg creature feature:

🎬 Scary fish movie needs bigger boat.

My contribution is a review of a book which I enjoyed immensely as a teenager. Two films have been based on the novel: one animated, one live-action.

📚 Kidnap plot spotted: rescue mission. Barking!

Can you identify the titles to which these miniature reviews relate?

🦇 Batgate

In my letter I’d told you that Jim and I had once encountered a bat swooping from the rafters of the hotel room we were staying in, and in your reply you asked me how we’d caught it. Caught it? Why? For a start, we were already in bed, and the bat wasn’t bothering us, nor was it in any distress. For all we knew it was a long-term resident of the guesthouse.

Here’s the video of our roommate again:

Our room was high-ceilinged with lots of nooks and crannies, and dark oak beams spanning the walls. To be honest I’m surprised we only saw the one bat, because there were bound to be others lurking in the dark. We opened the curtains a little in case it wanted to fly out of the open window, but didn’t try to evict it ourselves.

I rescued a tiny pipistrelle bat from our bedroom at home a few summers ago. It had flown in through a window and got tangled up in one of the curtains. It had fallen to the floor and was flopping about helplessly until I very gently picked it up and let it fly back outside. Its furry body was so, so soft, and I was struck by how fast its heart was beating – I could feel a constant throb rather than separate ticks. Its wings were extraordinary: thin as clingfilm, and very soft and warm. I still treasure the memory of that encounter.

🚿 Psycho

Terry, I’m still psyching myself up to watch your Hitchcock film recommendation. I know the iconic music from the shower scene, and I remember once reading that the ‘blood’ shown draining down the plughole was actually chocolate sauce. I guess one could get away with a lot when shooting in black-and-white. 👀

Warning: Do not eat chocolate sauce in the shower. You’ll end up with a scene from a horror film.

📮 Delayed delivery

I was tickled to find this news story about a postcard which Royal Mail delivered over 120 years after it had been posted! I mean, we had some delays during the last postal strike (a time we still refer to as ‘that Christmas when our cards arrived in late January’), but this is ridiculous!

I hope this letter of mine gets to you in decent time, Terry!

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

Leave a comment

If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published on Saturday.

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

Dear Reader, I'm lost

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

Read more

3 years ago · 1 comment · Rebecca Holden

Check out Terry's fabulous newsletter, and to make sure you don’t miss his reply to this letter next week, why not subscribe?

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Musings on everyday happenings and conversations, book reviews, experiments in creative nonfiction writing, writing advice.

By 𝚃𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚖𝚊𝚗

Last but not least, do please share and subscribe for free! Thank you!

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