182. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-22
Good clean fun and how best to describe the weather.
In which Rebecca takes offence at a marketing e-mail and frets about a recommendation to take liquid soap to a theme park.
✒️
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,
Thank you for your recent letter, which as usual was a delight to read.
Much less of a delight to receive last week had been this e-mail from my grocery delivery provider:
‘Your home wants a good ‘ol clean’ declared the subject line. Terry, I took offence immediately; I mean, the CHEEK of the people! And how did they know? 🫣 I had wondered whether to send them a pithy response but thought better of it, in case they are keeping tabs on the state of Holden Heights. What if they’re actually monitoring the volume of dust I sweep under the mat on a daily weekly monthly occasional basis? I mean hey, we’re busy people, but in my home-cleaning routine1 I do at least try to keep on top of the bits that show!
🧼 Good clean fun
Cleaning is important, though, and according to this bottle of liquid soap, it can PAY!
Half price entry ‘with this pack’? Terry, I have my doubts as to whether it’s altogether sensible for the promotors to encourage visitors who are brandishing liquid soap to the two theme parks and the national chain of aquariums whose logos are shown on the label. Riding a rollercoaster is scary enough without slippery soap sliding everywhere, and sodium laureth sulphate2 and fish tanks do not mix. Well, they do, but not, I imagine, in a happy way for the fish.
🫣
🌧️ Enjoying the weather
In a recent post I’d written a little about a super book I’m reading, 500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington, in which the author, having borrowed the necessary equipment and a dog, tells his story of hiking the South West Coast Path with canine company. I’m finding it a compelling and hilarious read, and I’d like to share this snippet about the weather in out-of-season St Ives, which is rather better known for being a sunny summer tourist trap:
There was talk of sunny periods, but this was just a rumour spread by landladies. Instead… a bank of cloud rolled silently into town. It was the colour of a bruise and as welcome in the bay as Jaws. Only one thing for it: an early lunch. I bought a couple of Scotch eggs… and took shelter in an alcove opposite the Gents.
Taken from 500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington, published by Arrow in 1986.
🔮 The trouble with the forecast
On the subject of weather I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to paying attention to the forecast. In fact, I’d go further: I have such a mental block about it that I’d categorise my aptitude – even after watching the weather bulletin – for knowing what Mother Nature might chuck our way in the same column as my ability to work out which direction is north south east west home.
Terry, that might be why I didn’t even notice the anomaly in the screenshot from the BBC Weather app which Jim showed me recently, which was something so out-of-the-ordinary that the story made the national news for a couple of days afterwards.
If you look closely at the black circles you’ll see that the wind speed in Edinburgh was showing as 17,246mph, with Nottingham and New Delhi not far behind. And they call those ‘hurricane force’. Okaaaaaaay….. 👀
💰 Monopoly
I was horrified interested to read your account of the Monopoly game you had played with four students, each of them representing a different economic class. For the purposes of the game, you explained, one player was designated lower middle class, one had inherited wealth and one was upper middle class, with property and the means to buy it apportioned appropriately to each. The fourth player, representing the unemployed, was given no means to achieve property ownership, his only recourse to funds being passing Go and collecting £200, which was of course then spent on paying rent to the owners of the properties on which he landed on his next circuit of the board.
Your concluding sentence of the paragraph began thus:
‘After a while he became so angry that he got hold of the board and threw it across the room….’
Well, Terry, no wonder. I hope it was you who tidied up the mess, and that at the very least you offered the boy a stiff drink cup of tea and an apology.
📰 Clipping snippets
Terry, how do you keep track of the things you’d like to write about? I have my writing log, which is a book, and in it I record any snippets I collect, whether they’re screenshots, electronic articles or newspaper cuttings, the theory being that I’ll know where to find them. 🤣 ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
The stack of cuttings on my desk had been threatening to turn into yet another pile of denial until I had the bright idea last week of storing them in an old writing case which I’d picked up on eBay. I say ‘bright idea’ but well, it’s now just a pile of denial in slightly more attractive clothing.
When I read A Curious Career, a compelling and highly-entertaining memoir by newspaper feature writer Lynn Barber about the many celebrity interviews she has conducted, I had been struck by this passage:
I used to love getting… yellowing cuttings from the Tasiemka Archive… Edda Tasiemka, a German émigrée, used to help her journalist husband by cutting out articles she thought might be useful for him. When he died she went on cutting out articles till her entire house was crammed floor to ceiling… with bulging brown files. She’s still doing it, aged ninety, but alas now editors balk at paying her fees and say you can find it all on the internet. You can’t, actually. You can’t hold in your hands the actual Sun front page that screamed ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ whereas you can at Mrs Tasiemka’s. I still sometimes go round to her house just for the joy of riffling through old cuttings.
Taken from A Curious Career by Lynn Barber, published by Bloomsbury in 2014.
I wonder if anyone will ever riffle through cuttings of my writing, Terry? Well, a girl can dream….
All the very best, as ever,
Rebecca
To those reading this letter to Terry over my shoulder: although I didn’t bring you a Saturday post last week I am hoping that normal service will resume soon. You’re very kind to bear with me. Thank you. ❤️
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‘Routine’ might be overstating the case a little here.
The stuff wot makes soap froth. You’re welcome.
We have a battered copy of Five Hundred Mile Walkies, which inspired us to walk part of that coastline forty years ago...we even had a dog, Susie, nicknamed Boogie!
Rebecca you are always a breath of fresh air when a girl … ok old curmudgeon … feels down. I can assure you your house keeping prowess exceeds mine. My dust can’t be seen but that’s only because it so high it’s looks like a blanket on everything. I love the writing case. Did Terry clean up the monopoly carnage I wonder? Pleas stop writing about interesting books. Lyn Barber’s is another for the increasing pile my house will soon look like Edda Tasiemka’s but with books.
Have a great week Rebecca and thanks for getting me chuckling this morning 😘😘