208. ✒️ A letter to Terry: #25-05
Eggs, a two-hundred-year rail journey and falling for a seasonal joke.
In which Rebecca goes to work on an egg and admits to having been an April Fool.
✒️
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, which as usual I read with relish.
🍳 Eggs
Your description of the letter’s contents right at top began ‘In which Terry ruminates on eggs’. You’re ruminating on eggs? According to the mid-century advertising campaign by the Egg Marketing Board the duty of a British citizen was to go to work on one!
Go to work on an egg was an advertising slogan used by the United Kingdom’s Egg Marketing Board during the 1950s and 1960s as part of more than £12 million1 it spent on advertising.
The proposition was that having an egg for breakfast was the best way to start the working day.
In 2007, plans to rebroadcast the original television adverts were rejected by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, which observed that the adverts did not suggest a varied diet.
🏘️ Meeting up
Jim and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming you and Elaine to our rural little East Sussex village recently. We’d invited you to join us on a day on which the closed-down secondhand bookshop would be open as part of its efforts to clear its stock after the owner’s retirement, and we all got so carried away that it was a good thing that I’d set an alarm to tell me when we needed to be heading back to the station for your journey home.
In fact, we picked up so many treasures at the bookshop that it’s a good thing we’re not afflicted by the condition I’d learned about in my attempts to answer the ‘Pub Quiz’ in the Saturday section of the Daily Telegraph on April 5, 2025.
Question:
Dreaded by avid readers, what does the Japanese term ‘tsundoku’ mean?Answer:
Acquiring books (or other reading materials) and not reading them, letting them accumulate on bookshelves and the like.
Hang on a second… did I just say we are not afflicted by this condition? 🫣
As well as book browsing we’d promised you a tour of Jim’s photography studio in the centre of the village. Despite having spent some time in there it’s ironic that it had occurred to none of us – not even Jim, whose actual job it is to snap people and places – to take a picture to record our meet-up for posterity.
I was delighted, therefore, to have been sent your own portrait of us, which I’ve reproduced below with your kind permission.
The likenesses you’ve achieved are uncannily accurate, including, it seems, a true-to-form Rebecca eyeroll. Quite right, too: as most of us know, it’s my default expression.
🙄 🥸 😎 😎
🧩 The Puzzle Corner
I’ve had a go at both of your crossword clues, because hey, I appreciate a challenge.
The first was this:
Two girls, one on each knee (7)
This one was easy, but only because I’d seen it – and solved it! – before! Each of my knees has a kneecap – patella in Latin – and look, Pat and Ella are both girls’ names. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
I’ve struggled with your second clue, and wonder if perhaps you’d made a mistake with the number of letters in the solution?
Loose American women on the waters in East Anglia (7, 7)
I know that a US-English term for women of questionable repute is ‘broads’, and having spent a boating holiday on the waters in East Anglia with family as a teenager I wonder if the answer you’re looking for is Norfolk Broads? If so, you needed to have put 7, 6 into those brackets! If I’m off the mark, though, and you are looking for two seven-letter words, I’d love to know the correct answer.
Let me move swiftly on to present this from a recent edition of the Saturday Telegraph, one of only two clues I’ve managed so far to solve:
Animated roadmen notice returning Galaxy (9)
Let me know what you come up with!
🚂 Taking the slow train…
I’ve been meaning to ask how your journey back to London had gone after you’d seen us last week. I’m assuming you actually made it home? I thought of you a couple of days ago when I saw an advert for British Rail with this slogan:
200 years of train travel
An unkinder commentator than I might be tempted to say ‘yeah, that’s because it takes that long to get anywhere by rail these days’. If you and Elaine are not home yet, that’s nearly a fortnight, which is well on the way to two hundred years. You’re possibly already nearly a travel statistic! 😱
🙃 Foolish behaviour
Speaking of the passage of time, although it’s already the middle of April let me nevertheless take this belated opportunity to congratulate you on your excellent April Fools’ Day gag of a post which you’d published on the first of the month.
Terry, I actually believed you. 🙄 #sogullible
On April Fools’ Day I read several articles on Apple News about how disappointing it is that in today’s internet-driven media so few April Fools’ stories make it into printed newspapers, and having rifled through every publication in the Village Stores on the day in question I share in that disappointment. The only example I found was a story at the bottom of page 3 of the Daily Express about a theme park erecting signage to show that their rollercoasters were not suitable for vegetarians or vegans due to the risk of riders swallowing airborne insects. 🪰
Terry, you couldn’t make it up. Well, then again…. 😉
All the very best, as ever,
Rebecca
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If the inflation calculator on the Bank of England’s website is correct, that’s around £235 million in today’s money.
A wonderful read until I got to the cryptic puzzles. They defeat me totally and I get so peeved. I walk around saying 'Fish bums, fish bums!' like Sister Boniface, and pushing my glasses up my nose. Well... not UP my nose but... well you know what I mean.
Terry's artwork is spectacular. Might we see it in the Tate one day?
Such a fine way to start the morning. I always feel as if I have had a visit with you when I read. your letters. It is always the first post I open. ( I love it that in Terry's group portrait he is the only one with a grumpy face. And that...ahem, nobody has a nose.)