135. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-06

Disastrous dressmaking and the Austen-tation of a weighty tome.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

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

Many thanks for your latest letter, some of the contents of which gave me considerable cause for alarm.

Although your point in sending the portrait of yourself and your girlfriend had been to convey to me the severity of your persistent chest infection, your switching to a blue hue from the more typical green to signify malaise has put a rather different – ahem – complexion on things.

Terry and his girlfriend (blue edition), by Terry Freedman

I am assuming from your drawing – which you’ve kindly allowed me to reproduce above – that your colour choice represents one of the following:

🔵 That your illness is making you cold. 🥶

🔵 That you are blue-blooded. True, you have long claimed the title of ‘Lord’, but that doesn’t qualify you as an actual royal, does it? 👑⁉️

🔵 That you’ve been coughing and coughing and coughing until you turned blue in the face¹. I’d say this is the most likely – and Terry, you have my sympathy.

However, I wonder if this edited version better depicts how you’ve been feeling?

Terry and his girlfriend (green edition), by Terry Freedman

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Speaking of illness, Jim answered the phone the other day, and the following conversation ensued:

Jim: Hello?
Caller: Is that James?
Jim: Yes.
Caller: You don’t sound like James.
Jim: Well, I’ve got a cold.
Caller: You didn’t have a cold when I saw you this afternoon.
Jim: I think you have the wrong number.

🤣

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I was interested to read the quote you’d supplied from one of Jane Austen’s letters conveying her frustrations, as a tall, slim woman, around getting clothes to fit her:

I cannot determine what to do about my new Gown; I wish such things were to be bought ready made.

My mum used to make a large proportion of her own wardrobe – and mine, too, when I was a child. For me she’d make all manner of dresses, skirts, nighties, shorts, trousers and dungarees, and she would always be beautifully turned out in home-sewn clothes; everything from her casual outfits to skirts and dresses in exotic prints.

Back then all of my trousers would be long enough without my having to run the gauntlet of a dozen hopeless ladies’ clothes shops before sighing deeply and resorting to menswear. 🙄

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Terry, I dabbled in sewing once, intending to make myself a summer dress.

Not really sure of what to look for when buying fabric I ended up with metres of heavy, coarsely-woven material rather than the kind of lightweight ‘flippy’ cotton which would have been far better suited for the task.

As for the dressmaking pattern I’d chosen, well, that was a disaster. The intended dress was to have three parts: the bodice, a close-fitting middle section with the two halves of a sash attached to the side seams and intended to be tied in a large bow at the back, and a loose-ish skirt part below that.

It took Jim just a single look at the heavy material and the design of my planned garment to decide to remind me of the following scene from The Sound of Music.

(The clip will start in the right place, and the relevant part ends 25 seconds later.)

Things got worse. To accommodate my extreme height the dress pattern needed some modification, and I felt the easiest way to achieve this would be to simply lengthen only the middle section. It was only when I started to sew the sash – cleverly cut to match the body of the extended middle section in size – that I realised my error.
Terry, the stupid sash was as broad as a stair carpet.

I’m sure Jane Austen had never had to encounter sartorial shenanigans on this scale.

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Speaking of Austen, I’ve been making excellent progress with Emma, which is proving to be a highly enjoyable read. Of course, I’m well aware that we Brits have been banging on about the weather since well before the early nineteenth century, but it’s lovely to read Austen waxing so lyrically on this universal theme in a book published in 1815.

In Chapter 13, instead of describing as I would the less-than-ideal weather conditions for a proposed journey as ‘it was snowing a bit, and Emma was worried that it might come down harder later’, Austen gives us these words:

The cold, however, was severe; and by the time the second carriage was in motion, a few flakes of snow were finding their way down, and the sky had the appearance of being so overcharged as to want only a milder air to produce a very white world in a very short time.

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Part of the pleasure I’m getting from the novel is that my copy, which was a Christmas gift, is such a beautiful edition. It’s a weighty tome, tipping the scales at just over 800g (a pound and three-quarters!), but it’s a beautiful book to handle, and it opens flat without any text disappearing into the gutter² of the binding.

Drawing by Rebecca

The pages are smooth with a slight sheen, and two features I appreciate in particular are the ribbon bookmark and the rounded corners of the hardback cover. Despite its weight I’ve been carrying the book around in my bag so that I can fish it out whenever I get a moment to read, and I’m impressed that so far it’s showing not a single scratch or dog-ear.

This is neither a hard sell nor an affiliate link, but do have a look at Chiltern Publishing’s website if you’d like to see how they present the classics.

Screenshot from the Chiltern Publishing website

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Terry, you’ll be pleased to note that the teabag emergency at Holden Heights finally ended on the arrival last week of this, courtesy of my grocery delivery service:

Ah, the relief! These are going to last me a while…

All the very best,

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:

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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

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until (one) is blue in the face

1. For a great or unending length of time; until one has done it to exhaustion.
You can complain about it until you're blue in the face, but you're going to school today whether you like it or not.
They are such strange friends. They'll argue until they're blue in the face, then they'll go out for dinner and be the best of pals.

Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2022 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

until you are blue in the face

INFORMAL

If you say that someone can say or do something until they are blue in the face, you mean that however many times they say or do it, it will have no effect.
You can speculate till you're blue in the face, but you can't prove a thing. The president can issue orders until he is blue in the face, but no-one will take any notice.

Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2012

do something until you are blue in the face

Persist in trying your hardest at an activity but without success. informal

Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017

2. You’ll no doubt recall this bookish bugbear of mine, which I’d first described to you back in November:

112. A letter to Terry ✒️ #26