159. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-14

Knitting the political temperature and staying snug on summer nights.

Jul 10, 2024

01414 CAPTCHA — Photo by Kai Gradert on Unsplash

In which Rebecca recalls a picnic in a sandstorm, makes a calculation using ACTUAL maths and admits defeat in her attempts to solve Terry’s latest crossword clue.

✒️

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 be published on Saturday.

Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, in which you had recounted some recollections of the weather during family holidays in times past. This is what you’d said:

Elaine remembers sitting with her parents in the car on the seafront eating fish and chips, watching the rain cascading over the windscreen and as far as the eye could see. My own holidays with my ancestors were spent, quite often, walking around in raincoats seeking shelter in a café.

I’m sure we had plenty of days out in glorious summer sunshine when I was growing up, but it’s the ones featuring picnics in typical British weather which really stick in my mind.

On one family holiday on a windy beach on the west coast of Cornwall I remember trying to enjoy the rare treat of a sticky bun as what I can only described as a sandstorm engulfed us. My bun was absolutely caked in gritty sprinkles, but tiny Rebecca was determined not to miss out and ploughed on with it regardless.

Grown-up Rebecca is still shuddering at the memory of how it felt to eat it. 👀

Probably not taken on the day in question. Never mind - it still depicts tiny Rebecca on a British beach. 🏖️

The first time my shiny new American cousins came over we headed out to an open-air museum for the day. I’m sure the whole of our visit was fun, but what I remember most vividly was the picnic we had in the car park, sitting on a tartan blanket and eating in the rain. The cousins were less than impressed at first, but cheered up once they were told that ‘this is what people do in Britain’.

people sitting on green grass field under green umbrella during daytime — To be honest I don’t remember that we had umbrellas on *our* rainy picnic. 🙄 Photo by Isaac N. on Unsplash

I hadn’t made the connection between the Tube map and – if you’ll pardon the pun, Terry – a circuit diagram, but with the map not being to scale I’ve fallen foul of the inaccurately-depicted distances a couple of times. I had once taken the Tube the two stops from Green Park to Leicester Square – a distance I could have covered on foot in just a few minutes – and once I didn’t take it from Green Park to Pimlico – again two stops – after a very long day at work, and arrived home absolutely shattered after a sweaty walk of over three quarters of an hour.

I wished I’d known that not all two-stop journeys are equal!
#lessonlearned

Mum swears by this map, which helpfully shows tube lines and their stations in the same eyeful as street-level London, giving a much better idea of scale.1

London tube and walk map from quickmap.com. Available from the same publisher is the 'all-on-one' map, which also shows bus and train routes.

Speaking of London, you’d asked me in your letter if I could identify the main landmarks in your Pixlr image entitled ‘Futuristic London at night’, which I’ve reproduced below with your kind permission.

I’d say that the only object whose shape is 100% convincing is the moon, and actually this picture shows a representation of it which is only valid for around 10% of the year.

Terry, I have calculations to back this up. Want to see my working out?

Though a full moon only occurs during the exact moment when Earth, moon and sun form a perfect alignment, to our eyes the moon seems full for around three days.
Taken from astronomy.com

In answer to the question posed on Quora ‘How many times a year is there a full moon?’ responder Tim Kuzniar shared the following:

The period of the lunar phases (the synodic month), the time from full moon to full moon, is ~29.5 days.
So, if you divide the Earth’s year – 365.25 days – by the synodic month you can have about 12.6 lunar cycles per year.
Taken from quora.com

So, ‘about 3 days’ x 12.6 times a year = 37.8 days when the moon will appear full.

37.8 ➗ 365.25 ✖️ 100 🟰 10.35%

And that means the moon will appear full just over 10% of the time. ✔️

In school maths lessons we’d always get credit for showing our working out for a calculation even if our answer was wrong, and on that basis, in an effort for you to judge my efforts in solving the impossible crossword clue you’d set me last week, I am showing you this:

I have no solution for you. 🫣 Please mark my work with due compassion. I look forward to reading your answer in the comments!

I’ve got TWO clues for you, rather less complicated than yours, and both, I think, ~~more~~ quite fun.

Here’s the first:

GG SE (9,4)

And the second – unrelated to the first:

Horse, badger (3)

Although we’re well into July it’s still really chilly, isn’t it? I had to laugh when I received this marketing e-mail from household goods firm Lakeland Limited, which they’d sent me on the last day of June:

Screenshot of an e-mail received from Lakeland Limited

And Lakeland aren’t the only ones thinking of blankets in July. In all the hoohah during the run-up to the general election on July 4 I was delighted to spot this little snippet of light relief in the Saturday Telegraph:

I’ve heard about ‘temperature blankets’, and I think Heidi’s idea for representing the political temperature in the colours of the parties who were successful in returning MPs to Parliament is an excellent variation on the theme.

I wonder how her 650 rows of knitting – one for each MP elected to Parliament – will have looked by the end of the count? Rather pretty, I would imagine, with MPs from fourteen different parties having been elected.

Substacker

Bryn Robinson

, who lives in Atlantic Canada and writes

Campfire Notebook

, showed her readers her completed 2023 temperature blanket here. Isn’t it gorgeous?

You’d told me in your letter that five people – all female – had signed up to your blogging course last weekend, and asked me for your thoughts on why it is that on writing courses the number of female students far outweighs the number of males.

I have been student and teacher on a number of courses in the creative field, and my experience, like yours, has been that the greater demographic by some margin has been female. I’ve taken one writing course, and indeed the ratio of female to male students on that occasion was greater by a factor of two to one.

Yet all the writers out there represent every demographic and walk of life, which makes it all the more interesting that these don’t always correspond to the features of the people who are filling classrooms.

Well, whoever we are, it’s great that writers are writing.

All the very best, as ever,

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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