35. A letter to Terry ✒️ #2
35. A letter to Terry ✒️ #2
It's stopped raining, and the road maintenance contractors have been!
Dear Reader,
This is my second letter to my fellow Substacker Terry Freedman of Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life in our series of informal correspondence about the things that Brits complain talk about the most, including the weather. So that you can enjoy exploring these clichés for yourself, we’re inviting you to read our letters over our shoulders.
In case you missed it last Thursday, you can read my first letter here:
Terry’s response from Sunday is here:
My latest letter is below: in it you’ll find me whingeing not only about the British weather but also the state of the roads! I’ll blame Terry and his comments in his letter on the ‘improvements’ being made to his own local infrastructure….
I hope you enjoy reading it!
Love,
Rebecca
Dear Terry,
Thanks for your letter – it was a great read!
I’m afraid I hadn’t heard of ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’, but having just had a look at the blurb online I’ve added the book straight to my reading list. I gather it’s a film, too, but I try to avoid watching films adapted from books until I’ve read the books, although I’ll admit to some lazy exceptions there. ‘101 Dalmatians’ – the animated original – was great, but when the actual book by Dodie Smith came into my life I realised just what I could be missing if I made a habit of only diving straight into films.
By sheer coincidence I’ve just been given the New York Times bestseller ‘Dear Committee Members’ by Julie Schumacher, which has arrived just in time to fit right into the conversation you’ve started about epistolary fiction! So, since you brought up the subject, let me treat you to the blurb on the back:
Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the American Midwest. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of unwise use of his private affairs in his novels.
In short, Fitger’s life is a tale of woe; a tale told in this inventive novel through a series of hilarious letters of recommendation, which Fitger is endlessly called upon to produce for his students and colleagues. Each letter is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits and passive-aggressive strategies, painting a portrait of the frustrations of modern life.
I’ll let you know how I get on with it – it sounds like a hoot!
So far I think the only epistolary-ish novels I have read have been written as diaries – think Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones and – although of course it’s not fiction – Anne Frank. Perhaps I’m just a nosy parker, but I love a real-life story more than any other kind of reading material, and diaries feel so, well, real, even the fictional ones.
Well, today it’s not raining, Terry, and although that makes a nice change these December east and north winds are making for chilly days and even chillier evenings. Jim’s always said that I’m ‘part reptile’ because I’m always freezing, but I’ve changed that script to ‘part butterfly’, because I like that rather better. Butterflies are equally cold-blooded, of course, not to mention notoriously short-lived, but they make for a rather prettier turn of phrase, don’t you think?
On the first outdoor evening shoot I did with Jim one November I ended up begging for him to call a taxi to take me to hospital because my hands felt completely lifeless. When I suddenly started losing grip of the lighting rigs and flashes in my charge I was told that any phone calls he would be making would be to his insurance people rather than a taxi service, because ‘you’re their worst liability, Rebecca’.
(He gave me a heated gilet that Christmas. We’re okay.)
In answer to your question: no, I haven’t considered pitching my writing to a magazine! Something for the future, maybe. I’m certainly regarding publishing weekly posts here on Substack as writing practice, although I’m not sure what it is I’m practising for! But thank you for your lovely comments, Terry – I really appreciate them!
Your thoughts on Scottish weather made me laugh, although I don’t judge it quite as harshly as that hilarious four-year-old in your letter. Having spent quite a bit of time in Scotland, I’ve found the saving grace of the weather up there to be that if it is raining, it won’t be soon, and if it’s a glorious day right now I’d better make the most of it, because it’ll be raining later!
It’s similar in the Lake District, where I spent time every summer as a child. My grandparents lived halfway up a fellside overlooking one of the lakes, and every year we’d spend plenty of time in and out of the water, rowing Grandpa out to the island or learning to sail. It never rained, not ever. It was always, always hot, and the sun would shine from dawn until dusk: I’m absolutely sure of that.
So I was confused on our visit up there in September. It rained, and then it rained some more. On the second morning we awoke to glorious sunshine at our high-altitude campsite, and it was only when I looked down towards the lake that I saw that everything below us had vanished under a thick layer of mist. The beautiful landscape, that live-action fine art painting that we’d regarded through raindrops the previous afternoon, had been cut from its frame and tossed away, leaving just white space.
It was eerie.
On that trip I froze for days, getting unreasonably cross about it being so difficult to dry weather-dampened clothes in a campervan, and on our very last day, in an it’s-changed-its-mind-again weather surprise of 24°C and bright sunshine, loudly cursed the fact that I hadn’t packed my shorts. Still, we made the most of the sunshine, hiking up to Stickle Tarn via a river gully, and with Jim’s complaints about his poor knees segueing seamlessly between my own very grumpy and repetitive ‘should haves’ about my clothing choices, we had a very jolly time.
Back to the here and now, Terry: despite it being absolutely freezing it was a glorious sunny morning here. I had to pop down into the village, and afterwards I walked the long way home. My taking-notes-on-the-go habit was rather hobbled by my frozen fingers – as usual I was dipping in and out of my pocket for my notebook to capture some words, but I was so cold that everything I tried to scribble down has turned out to be illegible. I gave up in the end. And this is despite finding those gloves I’d told you were missing! It was a wonderful walk, though – I haven’t been out nearly enough, and I’m glad to be back out there!
I’m writing this letter with the sounds of banging and drilling in the background. The fence between us and next door was blown over in the October storms, and there’s a chap here ripping out what’s left and replacing it with a new one. Next door are looking after him beautifully – all of the work’s being done on their side, although it’s our fence (and therefore our bill!) – with hot drinks being offered regularly. I might even pop next door myself to ask for a WT01 to be added to the tea round!
His truck’s made a bit of a mess of the lane, though – it’s not only churned up the soggy verge where I normally park my car, but with its offside wheels having settled into the two nearest potholes it’s also listing like a sinking ship. We haven’t had any flooding akin to what you described in your letter, but all the recent rain and ongoing lack of maintenance have been compounding our already alarming pothole problem. I swear that pretty soon our lane will be just one enormous pothole, and our two long-suffering speed humps will crumble into tiny, peevish chippings around it.
It's unadopted2, see. The local council’s not responsible for maintaining the lane: well, it is for some of it, the part of it which still has 1950s council houses, but some of those, including ours, are now privately owned thanks to Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ all those years ago, so it’s not immediately obvious who’s responsible for what. There’s a mishmash of old weatherboarded bungalows, big red-brick numbers, some pretty cottages, an empty house looking sorry for itself – I think if you were to do a study on slipshod rural residential planning and lousy village infrastructure our lane would be an excellent starting point for your research!
There’s a hoo-hah going on right now, actually, about site access to two building plots right at the top: is there a right of access up this private lane, or isn’t there? Are the two new houses going to be allowed to connect to the private sewerage system? Will our dodgy power network stretch? Will the lane even stand up to contractors’ lorries delivering timber, bricks and aggregate?
Maybe these snaps will provide the answer to that last question:
The part of the lane furthest from the main road was resurfaced a few years ago, before I lived here, with the bill split between the six houses which benefited from the spanking new tarmac. I gather that wasn’t without its political struggles, with the inhabitants of number ** insisting that the inhabitants of number ** were using more of the new bit to access their house and so should have paid more… well, I’m sure you get the picture.
However, the local council is in charge of maintaining the road through the village, and we got very excited last month to find this note that had been pushed through our door:
Ah yes, the beautiful new cats’ eyes. I’ll be generous and put this inexpert job down to the fact that the contractors weren’t working in daylight.
I hope the contractors will at least bring a spirit level next time. Oh, and enough cats’ eyes - because that image on the right isn’t a ‘before’ shot!
The fence man’s just about finished for today, so I’m off outside for a look-see before it goes completely dark. And then I’m going to tweak the thermostat and top up my hot water bottle – I’ve got quite cold up here at my desk, and your tip-off about Elaine’s heated pad has reminded me that hotties aren’t just for bedtime!
Write again soon!
All the very best,
Rebecca
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Thank you for reading this limited-edition ‘Dear Terry’ letter! If you’d like to follow my continuing correspondence with my fellow countryman, keep your eyes peeled on Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life for Terry’s reply. My response to his next letter will be published here next Thursday.
My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published as usual on Saturday. See you then! In the meantime, if you’d like to, please share and subscribe for free.
WT0 = white tea, no sugar.
Read about what I had to say about tea in my post Expec-tea-tion - the feeling you get when you know you’ve left a half-drunk cuppa somewhere.
This Commons Library research briefing sets out the following:
A private or unadopted road is by definition a highway not maintainable at public expense. The local highway authority is therefore under no obligation to pay for its maintenance.
Another one of these letters! I'm going to have my post redirected.
Love the letter format! I would vote for Augustus and Gilead as two of my favorites in this genre