187. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-23

I snooze, you lose.

Nov 27, 2024

white and black stop sign — Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In which Rebecca shares her writing log for the first time, is British about the weather, cross about loyalty cards and amused by a reference to ‘erroneous zones’.

✒️

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,

You haven’t heard from me for a bit – I’m sorry for not catching the postman last week!

Mind you, given the weather you can’t really blame me, can you? I mean, who gets up early when the weather looks like this?

Tuesday November 19

This had been the weather forecast:

An hour later came this news of extreme weather having hit less than 200 miles away:

Wednesday November 20

Next morning got a lot colder here, which wasn’t wonderful, but just look at the early morning light over the South Downs and the frost in the field! Now, that was something beautiful to be faced with when I opened the curtains.

Two hours later, with no warning whatsoever (‘sunny and light winds’, yeah right), came this:

Terry, I can’t keep up with it. 🙄

I thought I’d remind myself of how I like to react to what Mother Nature likes to throw at us.

A British Person’s Assessment of the Weather

☀️ Sunshine (temperature <25°C)
I’m going to BURN.

🥵 Heatwave (>25°C)
I need an ice bath.

🔥 Heatwave (>30°C)
I doubt I’ll survive.

🌧️ Rain (any volume higher than drizzle)
It’s coming down in torrents out there.

🌬️ Breezy enough to make leaves move
Wow, it’s blowing a hoolie.

🌪️ Properly windy
I can’t leave the house for fear of falling trees.

🧊 Frost (any level)
I can’t get the car out.

❄️ Snow (light flakes)
IT’S SNOWING! 🤪 Wonder if the trains are running? #hopenot

❄️❄️ Snow (settling on the ground to a depth of <1 inch)
Gonna ring work to say I might not be in. 😉

❄️❄️❄️ Snow (settling on the ground to a depth of >1 inch)
CAN’T GET TO WORK! 🙌 GONNA MAKE A SNOWMAN! ☃️

❄️💧 Snow (no longer falling)
I HATE this stuff. 😫 Cold, wet, massively overrated. 🥶
And the trains aren’t running. 🙄

🐈‍⬛ Good news!

I was so glad to read your report in your last letter that Minty is back at home with the rest of the family. I hope that she’s now full of beans and enjoying getting into scrapes with her brother and sister.

🛒 Shopping

Your section heading ‘Big Brother is watching your shopping’ fair gave me the chills! When I used to shop at the supermarket I used to have to brace myself at the checkouts to await the discount vouchers targeted at my demographic. Most – aimed at a woman of childbearing age (okay, this was a while ago) – would make me shudder. No, I don’t need half-price dinosaur-shaped ‘meat’ slices for my ~~non-existent~~ little darlings’ lunchboxes, nor a bundle deal on school uniform. Instead I’d welcome money off brassicas for the entire season and a BOGOF on Mr Snaps’ favourite coffee, thanks.

These days it’s even worse: loyalty cards have gone rogue. I don’t have a Tesco Clubcard, as I choose to shop with another grocery supplier online, but I popped into our local branch of the brand – the nation’s largest grocery retailer – a while back to procure a couple of packets of the favourite snack of our building contractors. Guess what? A box of Cadbury’s Fingers is £1.00 for Clubcard holders but £1.90 for the rest of us. 😲

Pfffff. Gimme transparent pricing! The price is the price, right? Golly, if the lovely people at the Village Stores started to play this kind of trick I’d relocate immediately.

🗃️ Keeping track of writing

I learned a great deal from the Bits and pieces section of your letter, in which you’d shared four methods you use to store articles, quotes and ideas which you might one day like to use in your writing.

I loved the sound of Wakelet, ‘the all in one content platform’ in which one can ‘bookmark, organize, collaborate and present all under one roof’, but I feel that this kind of online set-up might just propel me over the line into overwhelm. My own storage-cum-recall method relies on a handwritten record of things I’d like to be able to find in the future, in the form of a note on a dated page of my writing log.

Each might contain the following:

A keyword to represent a subject I’d like to write about one day, along with the page number/s of my pocket notebook where I might have scribbled down some notes about it;
The subject and source of an online article which I’ve e-mailed to myself and saved in my mail program’s ‘Writing’ folder;
The subject and date of any paper articles which I’ve cut out from the newspaper and stored in a box file;
A note of any Substack posts I’d like to link to in one of my own posts.

Plenty of pages in my writing log contain lists headed ‘LTT’ – for Letters to Terry – and here’s a snap of one from mid-October so that you can see what I’m on about:

Whenever I sit down to write my latest Letter to Terry, then, I know I’ve always got reference points at my fingertips.

💡 Ideas

That leads me on to your next question, which was ‘How do you write your articles? I mean, where do you get your ideas from?’

You’d told me that your approach is this:

I am often sparked off by some piece of news or a street sign, but even more frequently by my own imagination, drawing on my experiences and the people I’ve come across.

Well, I’m the same!

I often have three or four posts in mind at a time, depending on what’s caught my attention recently, and when I’m embarking on drafting my next Saturday post I will know which one or two I want to think about exploring, and which two or three to mothball for a future week. Some subjects are seasonal – for instance, this year I have written about marmalade-making in Seville orange season, asparagus in spring and the sheer joy of wearing socks printed with a milestone age at around the time of my birthday – but others I will write about just because those are what I want to write about.

Did I ever think I’d be writing about crisps and whether it should be compulsory for those of a cheese-and-onion persuasion to only ever be presented in green packaging, or indeed that I’d feel compelled to voice my frustration in a post that campsite showers don’t cater for the tall?

Nope. Not until I did!

📚 Trouble at the library

I enjoyed your tale of woe about the pre-overdue notice which you’d received from the library sending you on a wild-goose chase for a book which it turned out you’d borrowed in electronic format rather than hard copy.

‘There you have it, Becks’, you announced. ‘I HAD BEEN SEARCHING FOR A NON-EXISTENT BOOK.’

The overdue notice you’d mentioned reminded me of an entry I’d made in my writing log. I found a note I’d made on October 21 – Guardian, 113-yrs overdue book – and unearthed both a screenshot in my Photos app and a link to the article which I’d e-mailed to myself.

See, Terry, the system works. ✔️

Here’s the article, which tells of a book of Byron’s poems borrowed by young Leonard Ewbank in 1911 which was only returned to the library last month.

I’ve been enjoying harvesting silly newspaper headlines, amusingly incorrect choices of vocabulary and specimens of downright daftness. Since I last wrote to you I’ve found these to share:

‘Confident’ seafront toilets will stay, says leader.
Ah yes, now confidence counts for a lot. Mind you, I fear the days of the ‘timid’ seafront toilets must be numbered….

A vocabulary anomaly I’d spotted online: