40. A letter to Terry ✒️ #4

Snail mail in strike season - and is 'Undo Send' really achievable?

Jan 04, 2023

Dear Terry,

Happy new year!

After receiving your last letter I had toyed with the idea of sending you an actual letter written in proper ink to ring the changes in our epistolary project. Then I woke up. Not only are these Substack letters – meaning by definition that that’s where they appear – but at the time of my reckless thought of using paper, envelope and stamp Jim and I hadn’t actually received any post for over a week thanks to the Royal Mail strike that had been on and off repeatedly since the end of November. What hope did you have of even getting what I was going to be posting?

I don’t get much post, which is fine by me usually, but in the run-up to Christmas I was at least expecting a couple of cards. In an unrepresentative burst of efficiency we’d posted our cards on the 6th, long before Royal Mail’s moving goalposts of the last posting date, but my mother-in-law didn’t receive hers until the 20th – a full fortnight later!

First post in over a week, the week before Christmas. The letterbox could only just accommodate it all!

Maybe my mistake had been to post them second class? Jim said he’d heard that with the strike backlogs all second-class post was being put to the bottom of the pile in favour of the items with the more expensive stamps. I suppose that makes sense. There’s not all that much difference in price, anyway – maybe I should have just spent that extra 27p on each for first class? Or just have sent e-cards, with a corresponding donation to charity?

A card we received by e-mail contained the following festive message:

….meant to post it but cost of living, cost of stamps, and I saw an image of a fox peeing on undelivered parcels and letters so thought this would be a drier and odour-free way of sending very best wishes to you both.

Nice. 🦊🤢🎄

I hope you, Elaine and the cats had a lovely Christmas. We spent ours with family in my parents’ house, where I grew up, and it was terrific. Jim and I had planned to sleep in our campervan on Christmas Eve, but after the fun and games of stuffing and sewing up the unexpectedly enormous turkey and spending the evening sitting catching up with each other by the woodburning stove it felt like rather too much effort to leave the house to set up camp on the driveway. I’m grateful that there was a bed waiting for us upstairs!

It’s Tuesday today, Terry. At least I think it is. It feels like Monday, being the first morning back at my desk after the festive break – that bank holiday yesterday took me by surprise! Nice that New Year’s Day had been on a Sunday, granting us a four-day week this week, but it doesn’t help that I already feel so behind on things now that I’m supposed to be back up to speed!

This year in England we’re getting NINE bank holidays – one more than usual, thanks to the King’s coronation. Compared to some other places, that’s not actually all that many, is it? I gather that the US has eleven, and in the area of Germany where I used to work, we had the same. Two of those were religious holidays which happened on a Thursday, meaning I would only have to take a single day’s annual leave to get a four-day break from work. Quite a good wheeze.

At the time (it may be different now), paid annual leave entitlement in Germany was already a very generous thirty days rather than the twenty I’d been used to back at the firm’s London office, and I found it really hard to use them all. Just as well I didn’t, really: with eleven days of public holidays for staff to add to their annual leave I’m amazed that any work ever got done at all!

I know it’s a new year and I should be feeling invigorated by the thought of a fresh start, but gosh, time is flying all too quickly. Jim and I were watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’ just before new year, and at one point I said ‘Clint Eastwood was1 beautiful, wasn’t he?’

Jim let out a long sigh. ‘We all were’, he said.

Blimey. I didn’t have a response to that. I think I went and put the kettle on again.

Still, despite our feelings about the relentlessness of time we’ve been doing pretty well at our ongoing attempts to futureproof ourselves. Okay, far too much cheese was eaten over the festive season (cheese will be my downfall, Terry), but we’ve done our best to get out and about to walk it off.

Last week we headed for Seaford for a nice flat walk beside the beach, but it was so windy that my hat blew off into the puddle we’d parked in the second I stepped out of the van, and although my gloves stayed firmly on, an hour later my fingers looked like this:

Should my lifeless fingers audition for a part in the next zombie film, I wonder?

Still, it was lovely: the sea was dark and heaving – really dramatic – and, it being mid-afternoon, the sun was already on its way down.

Although it was still cold and blustery we went again on New Year’s Day, wondering whether we’d see any brave Seaford souls having their first open water dip of the year. We weren’t disappointed – there were several little groups of swimmers splashing around, and this lady in particular was enjoying her battle against the waves. It looked pretty dangerous to me, but I’m happy to report that she made it out of the water safely soon after I snapped this picture. She was laughing her head off.

The sea, this time at Eastbourne, ten miles to the east of Seaford, was calm as anything yesterday, and we saw paddleboarders and sailing dinghies and plenty of swimmers. We had glorious sunshine, and although there was a cool breeze there were plenty of people in shorts! In true Rebecca-style I’d dressed in complete contrast to this: I was wearing the fleece-lined trousers that Jim had given me for Christmas, plus all manner of layers on my top half, and I was as grateful to be wearing all those clothes as I was for the flasks of steaming turkey and Stilton soup we enjoyed for our lunch on a bench. The van’s temperature display had told me that it was 8.5°C, which I suppose is pretty mild for this time of year, but I have to say that I prefer double figures at least.

You were absolutely right, Terry, but until reading your last letter I’d had no idea that Britain had switched from measuring temperatures in Fahrenheit to Celsius as far back as 1962! I’m sure that as a child I’d hope for summer days when the temperature would be 70°, and we would certainly be talking about Fahrenheit, not Celsius. In 1962 I was precisely minus twelve years old, so we must have been using the two forms of temperature in parallel for quite some time.

And the Met Office weather forecasters still use Fahrenheit for comparison sometimes, don’t they? I mean, in a heatwave it’s far more exciting to warn the unsuspecting British public of temperatures ‘over 100°’ than ‘over 38°’, so I can see why.

I’ve nearly finished reading ‘Dear Committee Members’ – it took a back seat for a bit, while I finished an excellent novel that had gripped my attention, but it’s making me laugh out loud again. I hope you’ve been enjoying it too. Next on my list is ‘On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft’ by Stephen King, which I was very happy to receive for Christmas. I wondered whether you’d reviewed it, but it’s not included in this post of yours in which you review seven books for writers. I gather from the comments that it’s one for your list, though, so I’ll look forward to that.
Hey, I’ll’ve read it myself by then, so we could compare notes!

I’ve just updated my computer with the latest iOS, and I’ve noticed to my horror that I can now ‘Undo Send’ on an e-mail, which apparently is already an option on my phone. I’m not sure I approve! Surely it’s one of life’s great excitements to dash off an e-mail without giving it due attention and then to fret about the potential consequences for a lifetime? Hitting ‘Undo Send’ would surely remove the fun from the equation…

I’m late to the party – I gather this has been an option on gmail for some time – but this is what iphonetricks.org tells me:

Undo Send
This allows you to stop an email from sending for up to 10 seconds after you tap Send. The option is very helpful if you accidentally pressed the wrong button or you realize that you’ve made a mistake and want to correct it.

Ten seconds, though? It takes me longer than that to be able to even focus on what I’m supposed to be pressing…!

So, despite the postal strikes and the threat of vermin interference, maybe sending actual letters written in proper ink would be a better means of correspondence?

Write back soon, by whichever means you deem appropriate!

All the very best,

Rebecca

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