204. ✒️ A letter to Terry: #25-04

Rules, and what to do when your breakfast is so small you can't even see it.

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

In which Rebecca waits in vain for someone to do her homework for her, and offers her thanks for a course well taught.

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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 missive, which, as always, I enjoyed immensely.

🫵 Playing by the rules

In your letter you’d mentioned Shipman’s First Law of Action – a rule exercised by your father-in-law, of which the premise is ‘if you wait long enough, somebody else will do it’. Now, I’m all for conserving energy, and it’s fair enough to chance one’s arm now and again just to see if one can get away with not doing something, but when it becomes the life’s work ‘work’ 🙄 of a large proportion of society, well, that’s taking things too far.

I remember friends from school telling me that whenever they were asked to do something at home, such as the washing up or taking out the rubbish, they would deliberately carry out the task so very poorly that they’d never be troubled with having to do it again in the future.

Well, that was never wasn’t always the case in our house. Okay, we had our moments of trying to get out of our chores, sure, but we’d been brought up to do our jobs properly and with good grace. There’s no better practice for adult life than, well, practising it, but Terry, it was still annoying. I would enjoy baking cakes, but hated the clearing up afterwards.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

But guess what? The rule was that if you weren’t going to do any of the clearing up, you didn’t get to make the cake. Easy!

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I was intrigued by this headline I’d spotted online recently:

Dieticians answer your burning breakfast questions

I’ll tell you, Terry, the only question I’d be asking if I had the misfortune to burn my breakfast would be ‘where’s the fire extinguisher?’

Speaking of breakfast, the Village Stores had been unable to get hold of large free-range eggs from the farm last week, and had had to settle for a delivery of medium ones. Breakfast that first morning was a disappointment, and not just for me, but for my egg, which was considerably out of its depth:

I was able to cheer us both up by turning my egg cup upside down. Much better.

(After that minuscule excuse for a breakfast I certainly needed elevenses that day.)

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Terry, I’ve solved that devious crossword clue you’d set me! It was an excellent challenge, and I loved adopting the puzzle-solving techniques I’ve been honing.

Here’s the clue you’d given me:

Beautiful girl in crimson revolted (8)

The word revolted would be an excellent indicator for an anagram, but there were no other eight-letter words or combination of words to supply the parts for that anagram. I needed to look deeper.

I started in the middle. In crimson might give me something. In a crossword clue, in can indicate a word being split into two and then something else inserted between them. So, I thought, what do I know about crimson?

Crimson is red. I could put something into the word red! I set about making a word sandwich. Here were my options:

R _ _ _ _ _ E D

or

R E _ _ _ _ _ D

Okay, so maybe I’ve got three of those eight letters. What about the other five?

Beautiful girl. Well, REBECCA didn’t fit, which upset me greatly. What else could it be?

Beauty and the beast, then. La Belle et la Bête. BELLE!

REBELLED

And yup, that’s another word for revolted! Ha!

😇

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❓ Wrong words… or the right words in the wrong order?

Those instructions you’d found which recommended that you should drink water ‘continuously’ (meaning to do it without stopping) sounded both bonkers and entirely impractical. I’m glad to say I learned at an early age that continuous with an interval is continual. I’ve never forgotten that!

Word order can trip us up too, when it comes to working out what someone’s going on about. Mum sent me this lovely snippet she’d read last week:

Behind the sofa was a dog in a small cage which began leaping up and down, snarling and growling as J approached.

Is a cage capable of “leaping up and down, snarling and growling”? Maybe, if it had been an animatronic prop in a horror movie. If, however, it had been the dog leaping up and down, well, this would have been a better sentence:

Behind the sofa in a small cage was a dog which began leaping up and down, snarling and growling…

Pedant? Moi? Yup!

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📚 The End

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Terry, you and I have reached the end of a chapter! I don’t mean a chapter in our letter writing – of course not – but the end of a chapter in our pupil/teacher relationship. This week (well, yesterday, if you’re reading it when it’s published on Wednesday morning) is the last lesson in the online course The 60-minute writer which you’ve been teaching for the past eleven weeks, and I have to say that I have enjoyed the classes a great deal…

…and that’s in spite of your repeated demands on me to submit writing for assessment on a weekly basis:

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Well now. Although it’s from a much-younger-than-me student to their school art teacher, I hope you know that I have enjoyed your classes just as much as the writer of this note which I’d spotted online had enjoyed theirs:

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I’m glad that I hadn’t resorted to Shipman’s First Law of Action by relying on someone else to do my homework for me. 😇

All the very best, as ever,

Rebecca

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