201. ✒️ A letter to Terry: #25-03
The dereliction of youth and dodgy excuses for not doing homework.
In which Rebecca solves a chilly crossword clue, feels sorry for the coffee machine she used to work with and struggles to apply her eye to her ear.
✒️
This is the latest letter in my regular, informal correspondence with Substacker and fellow Brit Terry Freedman, in which we take it in turns to delve into the things that British people talk about the most. We’re inviting you to read our letters over our shoulders!
Dear Terry,
Many thanks for your latest letter, in which the word count of your copious footnotes was an almost perfect match to that of the rest. Impressive!
I hope you’re feeling much better after your bout of illness. You’d been struggling for ages with the flu, and now it seems that it was more likely to have been Covid! You have my sympathies. I haven’t knowingly had Covid, and am hoping to continue my unbroken streak.
📝 My dog ate it
I enjoyed being a fly on the wall at your recent teaching evaluation. I’d been plotting to not submit my homework ahead of the inspection, using ‘the dog ate it’ as an excuse. As a non-pet-owner, sourcing a dog for the task had felt too much like hard work, so I resorted to the less time-consuming option of actually doing my homework.
You’re welcome.
That reminds me of a concert violinist friend of mine whose sheet music had blown out of the window of her top-floor city flat when she was practising on a breezy summer’s day. Her subsequent social media post read something like ‘The conductor is never going to believe me!’ 🤣
📰 Puzzling it out
Like you, I enjoy the Concise Crossword in the Daily Telegraph, especially for the solutions of those first clues which together sound like a well-known phrase. You’d given the examples Boulders; Brass (bold as brass) and Cycle; Logical (psychological), and the clues ‘A parrot (5)’ and ‘Venetian artist (6)’ in the one I completed this morning resulted in Polly; Titian (politician). Rather fun!
You’d voiced your surprise that I do the NYT crossword. Frankly, I’d be surprised to be doing the NYT crossword, because that’s way beyond my capabilities! In fact, I like the NYT’s mini crossword, which is a much more straightforward challenge unless it’s one with very US-specific clues.
On the flip side to that, I’m not sure that residents of anywhere other than Britain would stand a chance of solving the clever crossword clue which you’d set for me to solve!
Flightless bird found in Iceland (6, 7)
Okay, this took me a while. Penguin sprang to mind immediately – a flightless bird with seven letters – but of course the clue was cleverer than that.
I had a think about Iceland. It’s cold there, and – apart from the Galapagoan species of the birds – the northern hemisphere isn’t much of a stamping ground for penguins.
It finally occurred to me that Iceland is a well-known frozen food brand in the UK, so, Terry, the answer to your clue is frozen chicken. 😇
I loved the headline Live and let DIY – How many Gen Z-ers does it take to change a light bulb? which I’d spotted in a recent edition of the Saturday Telegraph magazine. It reminded me of a joke at my expense at my former place of work, in a hilarious welcome by colleagues on my return after a long spell of illness. I didn’t immediately understand why so few of the lights seemed to be on.
And then….
A colleague: ‘How many [company name] staff does it take to change a light bulb?’
All the rest of them: ‘One, and she’s off sick.’
You see, as well as doing my actual job I seemed to be responsible for a whole load of peripheral tasks – y’know, the kind of stuff that plenty of others might not think about, like replenishing the loo roll, emptying the bins, and other such glamorous stuff. Once, on arriving back at base from a business trip abroad, I found the coffee machine was missing.
‘Oh, it’s broken!’ I was told. ‘We’ve sent it off to be fixed.’
The machine arrived back a few days later with these words from the manufacturer’s service department:
‘The drawer for the used coffee grounds needs to be emptied regularly.’ 🙄
Oh, and back to that headline, how many Gen Z-ers does it take to change a light bulb?None. They get someone else to do it.
I’m Gen X.1 I rest my case.
📻 Audio adventures
In one of her recent posts, Helen Redfern of The Anxious Writer 🌿 By Helen Redfern wrote about her target of reading all of Agatha Christie’s novels in order. I’d never heard of one of Christie’s early works which Helen had mentioned, The Man in the Brown Suit, and was delighted to find the audiobook at my local library via the Libby app.
A story that is very different to Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot mysteries which I know so well, The Man in the Brown Suit is narrated by an intrepid young lady who is determined to unravel the mystery behind the death she’d witnessed of a man on the London Underground. The terrific adventure was read by the fabulous Emilia Fox, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end.
Having grown up with spoken-word radio I love to have something to listen to, and these days I’m enjoying audiobooks more than ever. Recordings aren’t always perfect, though, and I sometimes find myself giggling at an unexpected style of pronunciation of a word or a mistake in the emphasis of a sentence.
For instance, I’d had to rewind the same part of The Man in the Brown Suit several times before I could understand exactly what was meant by
‘I applied my eye to the keyhole instead of my ear.’
When it’s written down like that it’s simple to understand – she’s looking, instead of listening, through the keyhole – but this is what I heard in the audio delivery:
Instead of:
Applying one’s eye to one’s own ear is, I’m certain of it, impossible.
Still, the book is superb, as is Emilia Fox’s reading of it. Five stars – and a giggle!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️😂
As I’d mentioned in the comments to your letter when you published it last week, I enjoyed reading your thoughts on age. ‘This will sound daft,’ you told me, ‘but I’m fascinated by the fact that I existed before some people, and that other people existed before me, and will exist after me. Do you experience this?’
Well, yes, and the older I get, the quicker time goes. I’m gunning for a rebranding of Generation X to Generation Just-Get-On-With-It-Before-it’s-too-Late.
I heard the following description of an elderly acquaintance recently, in an unintentional nod to Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop:2
‘She doesn’t really go any more – she’s very derelict.’
Ah, decrepitude gets to us all, I suppose. Shall we call it ‘the dereliction of youth’?
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!
Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! Check out Terry's fabulous newsletter, and to make sure you don’t miss his reply to this letter, why not subscribe?
Last but not least, do please share and subscribe for free! Thank you!
Baby boomers: born 1946 – 1964
Generation X: born 1965 – 1980
Millennials: born 1981 – 1996
Generation Z: born 1997 – 2012
Generation Alpha: born 2013 – present
A malapropism is the incorrect use of a word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. An example is the statement attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra, regarding switch hitters, "He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious", with the accidental use of amphibious rather than the intended ambidextrous.
The word "malapropism" (and its earlier form, "malaprop") comes from a character named "Mrs. Malaprop" in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks (to comic effect) by using words which do not have the meaning that she intends but which sound similar to words that do.
Light bulbs and coffee machines. They truly take you for granted don’t they? Happens so often. All that invisible extra work we do. Sigh. Another lovely read. Hugs from afar. 🤗🤗
I’m so glad you enjoyed The Man in the Brown Suit! X