162. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-15

A record-breaking journey and the risk of rain for forty days in a row.

Jul 24, 2024

white and blue love letter — Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash

In which Rebecca laughs at a recent attempt by the British weather to qualify for heatwave status, and is at last persuaded to admit reading defeat.

✒️

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 complained that you’d been wearing a winter jacket when you’d left the house in the morning yet found yourself ‘in the middle of a heatwave’ by late afternoon. How long have you lived on these shores, Terry? You know this about British weather!

I haven’t been impressed by July so far, I have to say. Despite all the talk of a heatwave last week, I feel that autumn has well and truly landed before summer had even got going: it’s now chilly, grey and wet.

Again.

A UK heatwave threshold is met when a location records a period of at least three consecutive days with daily maximum temperatures meeting or exceeding the heatwave temperature threshold, which varies by county.
Taken from the Met Office website

Here in East Sussex the threshold is 27°C (equivalent to nearly 80°F). We hit that for around a day and a half at the end of last week, therefore failing by a huge margin to qualify for heatwave status.

Legend has it that if it rains on St Swithin’s Day (July 15) the rain will persist for a full forty days, and given that July weather is so ~~ridiculous~~ changeable it is inevitable that several media outlets will run a St Swithin’s Day story speculating as to ~~weather~~ whether this will be the year.

And lo, the BBC News website published this one right on cue:

Screenshot taken from the BBC News website

Here’s what the article told me about St Swithin and his eponymous date in the calendar:

St Swithin was the bishop of Winchester from 852 to 862 AD.
On his request, rather than being buried in Winchester cathedral, he was buried in a simple tomb in the graveyard “where the sweet rain of heaven may fall upon my grave”.
However, on 15 July 971 AD his body was moved inside the cathedral. A huge storm then hit and it supposedly rained for 40 days after.
Legend suggests that the spirit of St Swithin was so outraged at being moved that he was responsible for this weather. The folklore therefore suggests:
St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain
Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair
For forty days, ‘twill rain no more
Reassuringly, the UK Met Office has said that since the start of records in 1861 there has never been a record of either 40 dry or 40 wet days in a row following St Swithin’s Day.

Given the level of precipitation on the 15th this year, Terry, I am sure you share my relief.

We’ve been chatting about the London tube map in our recent exchanges, and I was tickled to find this story about a group of friends who have broken the Guinness World Record for the shortest time taken to visit every station on the network:

Screenshot taken from The Guardian website

Terry, they managed it in 18 hours, 8 minutes and 13 seconds – beating the previous record-holders’ time by an hour and 56 minutes.

What a crazy, time-consuming project – well, not all that time-consuming, given that a speed record was broken in the process, but goodness me!

Thank you for the detailed explanation you’d given for reaching the solution of your impossible crossword clue. I’m impressed (and slightly miffed, given my own difficulties with yours) that you’d solved one of mine immediately, but liked that your answer to the other had only been forthcoming as a result of your explanation to a friend that the word ‘scrambled’ in a crossword clue indicates an anagram!

GG SE (9, 4)
Solution: SCRAMBLED EGGS

What had struck me as clever about this clue had been that the indicator was found in the solution, rather than in the clue itself – clever, huh?!

As of course are you, for solving both. You win.

I enjoyed working on your latest crossword challenge. Here’s a reminder:

Cut iron? (8)

The answer to this clever double-definition clue is DECREASE, which is a synonym both for ‘cut’ (as in reduce) and for ‘iron’. I’ll admit to having been thrown for initially looking for a noun meaning ‘iron’, but as soon as I realised a verb was called for, well, bish, bash, bosh. ✔️

I’ve found this one for you from a recent edition of the Telegraph. It’s pleasingly bonkers:

Vitality in appalling gag done about mate with ewe (3-2-3-2)

Terry, Jane Austen and I have recently encountered what I hope is only a short-lived hiatus in our relationship. I’d just about coped – eventually – with Mansfield Park at school as a teenager, loved every moment of the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, enjoyed both the audiobook of the same and the radio play of Sense & Sensibility, and fell deeply in love with the printed edition of Emma I had been given for Christmas.

Earlier this year I had picked up both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion second hand, and plumped for the latter as my first read of the two. I’m afraid to say that I’ve now returned it to my bookcase having only got a little over halfway. Why? Well, although parts of it are absolutely delightful I found its pace interminable.

I know that you’d busied yourself recently with reading all of Austen’s novels, and I wonder if you had found yourself as unpersuaded by Persuasion as I have been?

My recent reading experience caused this article about boring books to catch my eye:

Writer Callum Bains describes himself as a ‘chronic completionist’, and Terry, I can relate to that. I’d always felt that if I’m going to commit to starting to read a book which I’ve bought or borrowed, well, I owe it the courtesy of reading it to the end.

Well, not Persuasion. I had to put down The English Patient a couple of years ago, too, and very recently I gave up on a contemporary thriller which was anything but thrilling, providing me with far more irritation than entertainment.

Like me, Callum has changed his ways.

‘…last year I finally realised that this habit of seeing everything through was becoming a colossal waste of time. Time that could have been spent watching, reading, playing, or doing something else. Something more niche, something more experimental, something better.’

I picked up a couple of books from a church fundraiser a couple of weeks ago – the entertaining whodunit A Death in the Parish by Rev Richard Coles and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I gobbled up the former – a light-hearted Christie-esque post-Persuasion palate cleanser – within just a few days, and having started the latter yesterday I’m already gripped by Bryson’s highly entertaining account of his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail.

Terry, do you ever read online product reviews? We’ve just bought a travel hairdryer to use on board our campervan, and I was tickled to read one purchaser’s opinion of it:

Not being a pet owner I can’t vouch for how well it works on dog hair, but it dries my hair okay. Perhaps I’ll leave a review of my own.

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.