117. A letterospective ✒️

A year of chortlesome correspondence with my favourite writer on Substack.

Dec 27, 2023

a beach with a heart drawn in the sand — Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Throughout 2023 fellow Substacker

and I have taken turns every other Wednesday to delve into the things that British people talk about the most. Our readers were invited to explore these unashamed clichés for themselves by reading our letters over our shoulders.

If you’re not a regular reader of my Letters to Terry I urge you to stick around to enjoy this riproaring ride of a ‘Letterospective’ of our year of correspondence.

This stand-alone post is designed to be read independently of any of the letters in the series, but there’s a link to the index of our entire correspondence at the end of this post if you’d like to explore.

My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published on Saturday.

Dear Terry,

As 2023 draws to a close I feel it is time for a look back at our year of exchanging letters.

January

January had seen us comparing notes on our struggles with Royal Mail; yours having achieved a better outcome than mine. My letterbox had looked like this at around this time last year and there had been nothing I could do about it, whereas as a result of your complaints you had been invited to ‘…put forward suggestions for improvements to service.’

Well, it’s not what you know but who you know, eh, Terry?

Still, things were looking up. In your second letter of the year you schmoozed me with these words:

You always set such a high bar in terms of erudition… Why can’t you be an uneducated, illiterate slob like me?

Well, what can I say? I’m a natural. 😉

Oh, and I looked up ‘erudition’ as soon as your letter had arrived – and in so doing proved that I have a dearth of the stuff. You win.

In a January letter you had made your first mention of tea for the year; a topic to which – along with ‘Puddlegate’, the improbably drawn-out affair of your flooded/not flooded/flooded again local bus stop – we would return again and again during 2023:

I did once find a cup of tea and a plate of toast under my bed while I was at uni. But that’s a saga for a future letter.

Well, I’ve heard nothing else about those two underbed treasures in the eleven months that have passed since, so if you’ve been struggling for subject matter for any of your new year posts, well, you’re very welcome. 😉

February

Tea was a hot topic for us both in February, when you described in one of your letters ‘…a very traumatic experience. I ran out of tea.’ To my alarm you defined the drink as your ‘one indulgence’, which reminds me that I haven’t yet contacted Elaine to verify this bold statement.

*Adds item to to-do list for January 2024*

March

March saw us wax lyrical on our respective preferences for tea bags (me) versus loose tea (you), and we each chose to illustrate our letters with this photographic evidence of our respective enjoyment of the brew:

A warning shot of things to come was fired from your gunwales this month, with your question ‘What are you reading?’ An innocuous enquiry, I thought, until I scrolled down to your bulleted list of your SEVEN reads of the moment, one of which was a volume of multiple works. Just three months in and you were already putting me to shame. 😳

Still, I mustn’t grumble: for you had described me this month as a ‘clever clogs’. At last, recognition of my genius.

Ah, but too soon! In one of my own posts this month I had described to you my utterly hopeless attempts at finding my way around, which I had illustrated with this uncannily accurate diagram of my inner compass:

Terry, will I ever learn how to not get lost?

April

Learning was a theme for us in April, when you announced the launch of your ‘Advanced Drivelling’ course. Here’s a reminder of what you had promised in your course outline:

My advanced drivelling course will teach you:
How to witter on in a similar vein for hours
How to take charge of every conversation while saying little or nothing of consequence
How to turn the creation of persiflage into a fine art
All this, and you get a badge too, to proudly display everywhere.

I had of course claimed to be fully qualified in the art of advanced drivelling, although yet again I found myself turning to the dictionary; this time it was to look up ‘persiflage’. 🙄

This month saw me running not for the hills but for ‘space: the final frontier’ in my desperation to escape your unfathomable enthusiasm for Star Trek. You had apparently taken exception to this extract from my diary which I had written aged twelve:

May

You horrified me in May with your poor grasp of medicine, when you published your life-threatening treatise on the relationship you had insisted on drawing between gout and trench foot. Don’t give up the day job, eh, Terry?

We had some discourse about newspaper crosswords: you accused me of cheating, then proceeded to try to impress me with this phrase to throw at any ostentatious cruciverbalist I might find myself sitting next to on the Tube:

Hmm, apoplectic horseman in the north? Rather obvious methinks.

The only time I’ve BEEN on the Tube since you’d shared this passive-aggressive tip for engaging with like-minded intellectuals on public transport had been on my way home from meeting you in the Big Smoke, and as you weren’t even on the same train your coaching had proved to be entirely unnecessary. I’ll save it for the next time I am sitting next to you, shall I?

June

June saw you introducing me to jazz, when you shared a stunning video of the superb John Coltrane in action. I admitted to you that I hadn’t been around jazz much, apart from a single visit to an Edinburgh jazz bar in which ‘…I was fascinated by the young pianist, whose hands were moving across the ivories at the speed of light. When I saw him at the bar later I was surprised to see that he only had two arms, having presumably left his spare pair to cool down on the piano stool during his break.’

In your next letter you gave me renewed confidence in supplying me with a line to use on anyone who ‘…looks like they may attempt to out-jazz you’:

Of course, the 1954 recording has never been equalled.

July

In July you delivered some cutting words about my having ‘assailed your eardrums with Flanders & Swann’, so unimpressed had you been by my sharing of the video of ‘Transport of Delight’ in exchange for your jazz video. So that you can have another go at listening I’m repeating the favour right now. You’re welcome.

Other July delights included our ‘depluralised film titles’ challenge, in which we exchanged outrageous attempts to out-do each other with stylish silver screen smartalecry.

I offered you these:

Chitty Bang
The Lion, the Witch and the Coat Hook

…to which you responded with the following:

The Grape of Wrath
Lord of the Ring

Ah, those crazy days of summer! To prove that the heat had sent you more than slightly crackers you had asked me this in one of your letters this month:

As you were in London for… a wedding, why didn’t you bunk off and come and visit me and Elaine?

Careful, Terry, that sounded almost like an invitation… 🫣

August

In August I expressed my concern that Puddlegate had no longer been a focal point of any of your letters. Alarmed that you might have been suffering withdrawal symptoms from any mention of it since June I sent you this video to cheer you up:

But never mind swimming: it seems that cycling is your bag! ‘I managed to cycle at over 18mph UPHILL!’ you had announced this month in triumphant capitals.

Here’s the cartoon you’d shared with me at the time:

Picture of Terry Freedman by Terry Freedman kindly supplied by Terry Freedman

In return I had admitted that in my frustrated attempts to match Jim’s ease of passage uphill on his electric bike I have been known to hang on to the back of his frame to steal a tow uphill. Well, what else can you do, hmm?

Again you suggested that we meet up. Had you no concerns at this stage about the risks entailed with meeting strangers from online? You might well have come to regret this, Terry:

When it comes to our one year anniversary of writing these letters we could meet up in person.

🫣

September

September brought us more word games, initiated by your renaming of Shakespeare’s plays. Your suggestions of:

Julius Cheeser

and

Omelette

were both food-related, but I felt you had missed a trick by not including any dessert-based titles in your list.

I duly redressed the balance with:

A Midsummer Night’s Cream

and

The Taming of the Tiramishrew

Plans for our proposed meet-up gathered apace. In the interests of safety I had conducted a straw poll of my friends to educate myself on what to look out for when meeting up with complete strangers I’d found on the internet.

The consensus of ‘make sure you feel comfortable’ had reassured me no end, and I determined to bring a cushion to our date in case any chair I chose to sit on should turn out to be inadequately upholstered.

A rather neglected topic of our ongoing conversation showed itself again this month in our discussions about how long it should take to make a cup of tea. I think you’ll agree that my video demonstration of the entire process in less than a minute showed you all that you needed to know:

October

We nearly fell out in early October about the relative morals of ‘loose’ versus ‘decent’ tea. You had asserted the following:

You need loose tea, of a decent brand.

I was confused. Which was it to be, Terry, loose or decent? I attempted to assure you that the tea I use – fully-clothed as it is in the appropriate garment of a tea bag to ensure its dignity – represented the pinnacle of decency, and I resented the aspersions you had cast on the moral standing of my tea recipe of choice.

What’s more, during the day we spent in London together this month, I was horrified that despite all your talk about tea, tea, tea over the preceding months you chose to drink coffee! Overcome by surprise I spilled Elaine’s cup of the stuff: oh, how we laughed. Harder to shake off was the froth of steamed milk which I’d inadvertently tipped over you after we’d finished mopping up the coffee, but you were extraordinarily accommodating of my reckless behaviour, and kept smiling.

Jim and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting you and Elaine, and gosh, we had a great day, didn’t we? 😊😊😊😊

In your very next letter to me you mentioned ‘our next meet up’. I had vowed to respond with a recommendation for you to don oilskins and a sou’wester for Round 2, but thought better of it in case my suggestion prompted you to send me the bill for the dry cleaning which had been necessitated by Round 1. 👀

November

It was with some panic that I read this line in your letter of early November: ‘I think it’s time we did some lit crit.’ Lit crit? Literary criticism?

When you suggested that we review the books we were reading I feared I would at last have to grow up, or at least pull my literary socks a little further towards my knees. I mean, my reading has always been rather more lowbrow than highbrow; indeed, on many days I have struggled to reach the status of any brow at all.

Still, I grasped the nettle and furnished you with what I had felt was the perfect review of Mansfield Park. In your reply you told me that I had done ‘…a marvellous job… of… spoiling the plot of Mansfield Park’, which I must say extinguished entirely the nineteenth century inner glow which until then I had been glad to share with Austen and her female contemporaries.

As I reminded you at the time, Terry, surely the whole point of a book review, particularly in the case of a volume extending to over 450 pages, is to save any would-be readers the efforts of picking the book up to read themselves? 🙄

Literary austentation 😉 aside, though, November saw the welcome return of Puddlegate as a subject of your letters. You were kind enough to recap the story so far with a photograph of the offending lake, along with these words:

For people who are new to this phenomenon, it is simply that before my council improved the pavement near the bus stop there was never any accumulation of water. After the improvement the place started to resemble Lake Superior.

December

I do hope that Father Christmas has brought you everything your heart desired, Terry. I suspect a book or two made it down the sooty chimney of Freedman Towers, did it? That might keep you quiet for a bit.

I always giggle when I read about evil-doing well-meaning aunts and uncles giving their young nieces and nephews something noisy by way of a gift. You know the kind of thing: a megaphone, a drum kit, a karaoke machine or – horror of horrors – a recorder.

Let me remind you of my tale of my brother’s recorder-playing:

…when [he] first started learning to play the recorder he would invite an entire flock of seagulls along to join in with his practice. I was so disappointed to later discover that the seagull sound was a direct result of his pulling the two halves of the instrument apart, discarding the bottom part and then blowing into the mouthpiece at the top of the remaining half at full steam while bashing the palm of his hand repeatedly against its other end. His eventual graduation from the recorder to the cornet was a relief, if only from the seagulls.

Well, I had to laugh at this letter to the editor published in a recent edition of the Saturday Telegraph:

I leave you with this extract from the horoscope for Scorpio which I had shared with you at the beginning of this month:

This is… an excellent time for writing.

In that vein, dear Terry, I’m already looking forward to your first letter of 2024. Happy new year!

All the very best,

Rebecca

EPILOGUE

Do you fancy starting your own exchange of letters with a fellow Substacker? I can thoroughly recommend it! Here’s what writing to Terry on a regular basis has brought me:

The opportunity to respond to questions, themes and subjects which I otherwise wouldn’t think to tackle in my Saturday posts;
The chance to learn – Terry has brought jazz, Jane Austen and Oulipo to my radar;
The opportunity to explore a theme across an extended period – for instance, the progress of ‘Puddlegate’ has provided me with no end of chortles during 2023.

And on a personal level I have thoroughly enjoyed Terry’s sense of humour, his encouragement to look at the world from his viewpoint rather than only my own, and his generosity in everything he has shared with me over the past 52 weeks.

Terry, thank you.

Watercolour and gouache artwork by Rebecca

🎄🎄🎄

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.

Dear Reader, I'm lost

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