37. A letter to Terry ✒️ #3
37. A letter to Terry ✒️ #3
A flurry of snow and a couple of walks: the latest missive in the 'Letters to Terry' series.
Dear Terry,
Thank you for your latest letter, in which you kindly categorised me as ‘an actual person’. I appreciate the validation, given that it was such a complimentary comparison to your previous correspondent at the DHSS. I’m blushing.
I was interested in – and of course very grateful for – your explanation of the Thames Path: how extraordinary that a path running alongside the Thames should have been named with such inventive flair. Those people must have really known their stuff!
Before I had ever set foot on its eponymous path I had thoroughly enjoyed the account of a trip on the Thames in the wonderful ‘Three Men in a Boat’ by Jerome K. Jerome. It’s my favourite book, actually: my godmother gave it to me just before I headed off on my first teenage travels to Germany, and I’ve read it again many times since.
I hadn’t know anything about the book beforehand, and had at first been surprised at lines such as ‘We did not know what scrambled eggs were….’, and this rather dated, albeit hilarious, description of the men’s plans for their boat trip:
We arranged to start on the following Saturday from Kingston. Harris and I would go down in the morning, and take the boat up to Chertsey, and George, who would not be able to get away from the City till the afternoon (George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two), would meet us there.
Surprised at this rather old-fashioned tone – not to mention the unlikely-in-this-day-and-age reference to a bank being open AT THE WEEKEND – I flipped to the first page of the book and found it had first been published in 1889! Have you ever read it? It’s delightful and laugh-out-loud funny, and it certainly stands the test of time.
Well, after several days in which a succession of local folk – none, to my knowledge, with any actual Met Office training – had declared to me in greeting as I went about my business in the village that it’s ‘too cold’ for it, we’ve had snow.
Too cold for snow?
Terry, I’m concerned that my fellow villagers don’t seem to know that snow is cold. Might I put them in touch with you so that you can explain it to them in the sort of simple terms in which you had kindly enlightened me about the Thames Path? They may find it helpful.
Well, whatever the right temperature is for snow, down it came. Jim was out in the garden on Sunday afternoon chucking back all the stuff he’d pulled out from between the conservatory and the fence when we had the fence done last week, and came in with a long sigh and damp hair because it had started raining unexpectedly. A moment later huge flakes of snow started to fall, and within a very few minutes we’d landed in Narnia.
I know it may look as if we’ve nicked the lamppost from the set of the 1988 BBC adaptation of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, but no, this is a family heirloom, uprooted from a rural station platform many decades ago and replanted in a succession of Holden gardens ever since. Rather swish, don’t you think? Yesterday was the first time in months that I’d switched the light on – at first it worked, then the bulb flickered and died. By the time I had got back to the living room to gee up His damp-and-reclining-under-a-warming-blanket Lordship to go and get the ladder out of the shed, behold: the bulb was on again! Not for long, though. Jim stayed put. We reckoned it was too cold for light bul..… oh, never mind.
My fears that the overnight frost last night would turn the slush on our potholey lane into a deathtrap were almost realised this evening when Jim came a cropper on his walk home from the studio, falling flat on his back cushioned only by his rucksack full of camera gear. Thankfully his own initial assessment has shown the ‘important stuff’ to be okay, although Jim has a bruised wrist and a dented soup flask. Oh, and his hat got run over by a car coming up the lane shortly after his fall, but it’s survived to tell the tale.
You mentioned dodgy roads near you, too, Terry – have they been passable in this weather? I hope you’ve managed to stay upright. With all this snow and ice around I wonder how many people have been skidding their cars into those potholes you mentioned? The management team at Sainsbury’s ought to invest in sorting out their access road issues – I reckon they’ve got the money!
Have you noticed that they’ve got minds of their own? Pot holes, I mean, not the powers that be at Sainsbury’s. They grow and deepen, and in our lane they ‘benefit’ from one of the neighbours filling them up with hardcore or gravel any time they’re doing any hard landscaping in their garden. I wouldn’t mind, but adding the large-scale equivalent of scouring powder to an already disintegrating surface is surely going to make the potholes yet deeper? And as for the ones on our actual roads I swear they move overnight.
Like the shingle on the beach at Seaford. We popped down there on Saturday to make the most of the decent weather before the snow we’d been warned about, and gosh, it was beautiful.
As it was the weekend, the contractors were taking a break, but on weekdays for the last month huge earthmovers have been trundling up and down the beach every day to counteract what I gather is called ‘longshore drift’. For weeks at a time a few times a year they busy themselves repopulating the centre of the beach with the pebbles that have been washed to its eastern and western extremities, and then, when they all get washed away again, they do it again. Talk about painting the Forth Bridge!1 Is there much job satisfaction, do you think, moving pebbles that are only going to get washed away again so soon? At least efforts are being made to counteract coastal erosion and maintain the beach, so fair enough, although to me it smacks slightly of Canute’s failed efforts to stop the tide.
I laughed when you suggested that Jim should swoop to my aid in my frozen-fingered note-taking struggles! It’s generally on my solo walks that my word factory leaps into action, but maybe I could employ him regularly as a shadowy scribe. He never seems to get cold hands, whereas my fingers seem to wither and die at their knuckly roots at the first sign of a single-figure degrees Celsius.
On our rare walks together we’re generally too busy chatting for any words to be captured in my notebook, and when I’m talking to him I can’t be flinging phrases around in my head the way I do when I’m out on my own. Not that phrase-flinging is a comfortable state of affairs in the first place: it just happens, and then I have to capture the words, or I feel guilty that they’ve been left behind. Oh dear. Perhaps I should just record them on my phone?
Well, in your honour I tested my ‘Voice Memos’ app for the first time on my walk on frozen snow this morning, and although I was too self-conscious to actually speak, here’s a brief soundbite:
I’ll let you know once I’ve plucked up the courage to record thoughts rather than footsteps on my word-catching walks. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
Have a delightful Christmas, Terry, and I look forward to our correspondence continuing in 2023!
All the very best,
Rebecca
If you enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you!
Thank you for reading this limited-edition ‘Dear Terry’ letter! You’ll find the rest of my letters in the series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page.
Or just click below to read both sides of our correspondence in one place:
Please check out Terry's own newsletter, and subscribe if you’d like to!
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.
‘To be like painting the Forth Bridge’
To be such an involved or time-consuming improvement process that it never truly ends. The phrase refers to Edinburgh's Forth Bridge, which once required constant upkeep. It is so long that once the painters had reached one end they would have to begin again at the other. Primarily heard in UK.
Taken from Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2022.
I live in Eastbourne where the same pebble moving ritual takes place. This post made me laugh. Loved it.
It can be too cold for snow, but as a smug Canadian, I very much doubt it was there! It’s why the coldest parts of Canada aren’t actually as snowy as you might expect.