216. ✒️ A letter to Terry: #25-08
Well, well, Wells, and the scourge of the left-handed cake fork. Also: holiday snaps!
In which Rebecca admits that she had failed to read the instructions in Terry’s last letter, and shares pictures of her strenuous holiday.
✒️
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,
It’s only now, a week after you’d published your latest letter, that I’ve noticed a challenge which you’d concealed in plain sight:
‘Spot the hidden song title’, you’d written as a sub-heading.
In your declaration that you’d been overcommitting your time recently, you told me that out of the classes you were taking on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, you had ‘…ditched the Friday course and feel much better for it. It’s surprising what a difference a day makes.’
Got it! What a Difference a Day Makes is a song popularised by Dinah Washington in 1959, when I was minus fifteen years old, although it had been written a full 25 years before that, in 1934, by Mexican songwriter Maria Grever. In its original Spanish it had been called Cuando vuelva a tu lado, or When I return to your side. Rather lovely!
I found the details above on Wikipedia.
🙇♂️ Very puzzling
You’ve given me two clues to attempt to solve this time:
Considerable trouble in darkest Yorkshire at the outset (4)
Trouble is often used in crossword clues to indicate that an anagram needs to be solved, although here it’s a red herring! At the outset tells me to look for the first letters of words, and given that I know the answer is four letters long it’s clear that it must be made up of the first letters of trouble, in, darkest and Yorkshire.
The solution – tidy – in British English, at least, is often used as a synonym for considerable, as in ‘it always takes me a tidy amount of time to make my letters to Terry even barely comprehensible’. 😉
Your second clue – full disclosure: I’d begged you in an e-mail for your assistance to solve it – was this:
Start of hundred inch garden feature? (5)
The beginning of the word hundred is the letter h.
Inch can mean to move slowly, and a synonym for that word in this context is edge.
H + edge = hedge
And lo, a hedge is a garden feature.
🙌
Easy when you know how… or whom to ask. 🤣
Here’s one from me from a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph:
Spooner’s settlement ten cents for break from work (8)
What’s the answer, and why?
🚐 On the road
Since I last wrote to you, Terry, Jim and I have been on a short break in our campervan to the smallest city in England: Wells in Somerset. My holiday snaps below show you at a glance quite how very energetic I was:
It was all go on Day 4, though. Jim had an all-day work commitment in Wells, and having been left to my own devices, under my own steam I had a fantastic explore of the place, dipping in and out of cafés and bookshops every five minutes whenever I needed a breather. I’m sure you’ll understand why when you see my step count:
Lots of things caught my eye on my multiple-stop tour of the city: the tiny beginnings of fruit appearing on the mulberry trees in the bishop’s palace garden, dogs paddling to cool off in the culverts beside the High Street containing the run-off from the wells from which the city took its name, and, best of all, this sign giving a very unspecific, tenuous explanation for a street name:
Okaaaaaaaaay………
I’m sorry, town planners, but ‘probably’ is hardly an obvious claim to fame. Did just one property-owning Chamberlain family exist during that whole historical period? The Middle Ages stretched from the fall of the Roman Empire in around 500 AD to the beginning of the Renaissance in the late 1400s, and there might have been four dozen or more entirely unrelated families named Chamberlain in that time! Also, the sign doesn’t actually specify a geographical area, so was the street even named after the Wells Chamberlains in the first place, hmmm? 🤔
I am happy – and even more surprised to write this that you will be to read it – to announce that in a whole day fending for myself I got lost precisely NOT EVEN ONCE. I even used a map sensibly enough to find it helpful – which, quite frankly, is a first.
Do please pardon the pun, but perhaps I have turned a corner… 🤣
👉 Biased handedness 👈
Terry, I’ve always known my left from my right, although in my 50 years of left-handedness I am still finding plenty of room for resentment at being sidelined by product designers insistent on catering only for the other 90% of the population:
The spatulas are an abomination which I would find deeply frustrating to use. The very existence of the right-handed cake fork annoys me no end (erm, why not just make symmetrical ones?), but I am proud to tell you, despite having always been very childish about the discriminatory handedness of cake forks, I have never yet allowed a right-handed one to prevent access to a little something to accompany my cuppa.
I want to have my cake and eat it too... Cos that’s life, innit? 🤷♀️
All the very best, as ever,
Rebecca
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I love the idea of cryptic crosswords, I can see how they work once given an answer but my brain will not agree to solve them 😂
I can manage the hardest of crosswords from the NY Times, no problem, but the types of puzzles you and Terry toss back and forth are just mind boggling to me. Your answers always make perfect sense, but how you arrive at them eludes me. However, that bowl of stew is right up my alley.