123. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-02

Books, stolen street furniture and turning a cruffin into a cruffstard.

Jan 24, 2024

a close up of a street sign on the ground — Photo by Richard Bell on Unsplash

This is the latest letter in my regular, informal correspondence with Substacker and fellow Brit

, in which we take turns every other Wednesday to delve into the things that British people talk about the most. So that you can explore these unashamed clichés for yourself we’re inviting you to read our letters over our shoulders.

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

Dear Terry,

Thank you for your latest letter, which I enjoyed immensely. However, I have to pull you up on something you’d written right at the start:

“I am pleased that you adopted my new numbering system: you know it makes sense.”

I have two problems with this absurd sentence:

Numbers do not make sense.
Systems only make sense if you know the system.

I am au fait with any systems which I have devised, but those initiated by anybody else, Terry – your own included – I’m afraid do not make sense. Well, not to me, at least.

Thank you for your kind compliment about my snow video and the station lamp. I had thought that indeed the lamp had come from the station where Jim’s grandad had been employed but no, further research has revealed that Grandad had bought the lamp at auction during the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, in which many rail routes and stations were closed down and service changes made as part of the restructuring of the nationalised railway system across the country.

‘Our’ lamp had later been installed at Jim’s mum’s house, and when she moved a few years ago Jim and I adopted it for our own back garden here at Holden Heights, where we think it makes a lovely feature.

I too have heard of students nicking street signs; indeed, at my own alma mater, a university in the frozen north, I remember waking up one wintry morning and seeing a temporary traffic light in the very centre of the college lawn embellished with such a thick layer of snow that a picture of it would have been worthy of any Christmas card.

Bournemouth: snow-covered traffic light in West Cliff Road by Chris Downer. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Rumours abounded as to which group of known campus tearaways might have been responsible for the crime of half-inching the light from a set of local roadworks, but I’m not even sure that anyone was ever brought to account. I remember feeling disappointed that nobody had plugged the light in – those colours would have looked delightful lighting up the early morning snow.

I was glad not only to have read in your latest letter that your books are in the process of being restored to their shelves at Freedman Towers, and ‘in a semblance of order’, to boot, but also that you have been using a software program to catalogue them. Bravo on both counts!

An ongoing item on my own to-do list has been to go through our very random collection of books. I have boxes of textbooks in the loft, both from school and university (German grammar, anyone?), and plenty relating to my past life as a glass artist.

The bookcase on the landing has shelf spaces of various heights, and at the very least I need to put the tall books properly into the taller sections rather than simply laying them flat and stacking them up on the shelves that are less tall.

Do you really think that it’s a better idea to arrange books by colour rather than, say, in alphabetical order, by genre or according to subject matter? I’m sure your shelves would look very pretty but gosh, there’d be quite some effort involved in trying to find what you’re after!

wooden bookcase filled with books — Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Then again, if random is what you’re after why not shelve your books with the spines facing the back of the bookcase? Assuming the pages of all your books are in similar shades of white, off-white and cream you would end up with a soothingly blank wall of pages to look at, and taking any book down off the shelf will lead to a surprise.

😉

How do you feel about culinary mash-ups and their portmanteau names, Terry?

Banoffi – or, as I prefer to spell it, banoffee – pie was invented in the 1970s by Ian Dowding of the Hungry Monk, and I can report that his spectacular original version has remarkably little in common with the unimpressive offerings by that name offered at restaurants these days. Jim was fortunate enough to photograph Ian for a local glossy magazine a few years ago, and was given not only two slices of his famous pie – one for Jim, one for me – but also a copy of his latest recipe book, ‘Fish Bananas’.

Ian’s original pie recipe calls for a pastry case, not one made with biscuit crumbs and butter, and the thick layer of whipped cream is flavoured with coffee. Terry, it’s delicious.

banana + toffee + coffee = banoffi/banoffee

Now, I don’t much go in for puddings, but I love a culinary neologism!

I’ve heard of ‘cronuts’, which I gather are a cross between a croissant and a doughnut, but until our recent trip to Norfolk the ‘cruffin’ had never crossed my radar. This messy mix of shardlike buttery crumbs and soft custardy filling owes its name to the clumsy compounding of the words ‘croissant’ and ‘muffin’, having been made of croissant dough furled into a pinwheel shape and bunged into a muffin tin for baking.

Now, the custard filling isn’t included in the ‘cruffin’ name – and nor, might I just say, did the custard really fit all that well into the item itself – so I am suggesting this NEOneologism for this creation:

Cruffin + custard = cruffstard

Sounds more like a name for a shaggy dog than a new-age baked good, but it does at least refer to all of its component parts.

I was lucky to even get the above shot, as at the time the cruffstard was nanoseconds away from being scoffed by Jim. He absolutely loved it, of course, but the resulting showering of the van in a thick layer of cruffumbs rendered the delicacy rather less popular with me.

Speaking of Jim, he greatly appreciated your book recommendation:

‘Basic Photography’ sounds right up his street. He’s sick of his working world being almost exclusively populated with gear labelled ‘Pro’, ‘Pro-X’, ‘X-Pro’, ‘Ace Pro’, ‘Pro-Max’ and, who knows, ‘Turb-Pro’ that I think the adjective ‘Basic’ would be a welcome relief to the hyperbole. This habit is not limited to the naming of camera equipment, either, but stretches even to electric toothbrushes. Take, for instance, the ‘Oral B Pro Series’, a product which I can assume is not intended for my amateur dentist self because I am not a professional brusher of teeth. 🙄

As for ‘Good Handwriting and how to acquire it’ – your literary recommendation for me, Terry – it’s clearly something which this handwritten draft of mine shows I could do with:

Now, I think the least said about that, the better….! 😁

All the very best,

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

Discussion about this post