84. A letter to Terry ✒️ #18

Canal boating, Devizes and desires, and some droll depluralisation.

Dear Terry,

Thank you for your recent letter, which of course I read with interest.

You’re absolutely right: I hadn’t mentioned ducks in my letter, and I’m glad that you saw fit to include the photograph of Mrs Duck for me to admire. Ducks are my favourite animal, in fact, and I’ll never forget the birthday on which I was given a trio of ducks of my very own. They were gorgeous: a pair of white Indian Runners, shaped more like bottles than birds, and a much less tall but equally pretty Khaki Campbell.

Haffle, a female Khaki Campbell, is on the left. Hector, an Indian Runner drake (you can tell by the curly tail and very bright feet and beak), is on the right. I loved these guys. Homily, Hector’s wife, is not pictured here. WE WILL NOT TALK ABOUT THE FOX. 😢

I enjoyed reading the two posts about fountain pens that you’d linked to. How interesting that it’s the weight of the pen itself that makes such a difference to one’s handwriting. I shall pay particular attention in future. This letter to you is one that I’m typing directly onto my computer. Did you notice? Obviously if I were posting it to you direct, its copperplate-scripted envelope would be hand-delivered by your postman, so impressed would he be by the sheer quality of the penmanship of your correspondent.

However, given that I’ve just got back from a seven-night trip in the van I’m choosing to get up close and personal with my computer keyboard rather than trying to impress you with my handwriting. You don’t mind, do you?

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You may have been wondering about the title of this post, ‘Devizes and desires’. No, that’s not a typo! I’ll admit that this letter to you is lacking in the desire department (I know you won’t take this personally, Terry), but I couldn’t resist the play on words¹ around the name of the Wiltshire town of Devizes, where Jim and I spent a few nights of our trip.

Well, it seems the local folk of Devizes are a lusty lot, given to clog dancing on a Tuesday night in July! Now, I’m familiar with Morris dancing, and clog dancing certainly looks like a very close relation.

Here’s a video of ‘Hips and Haws Clogs’ in action in the car park of the pub next to our campsite:

I have no idea how the ladies were actually dancing in clogs. I had a pair of black suede clogs – proper wooden-soled ones, Terry, not even with rubber trim – when I lived in London, and I remember one dress-down Friday when I went clubbing straight after work. That’s the only time I’ve ever checked a pair of shoes into the cloakroom – there being no way on earth I felt I’d be able to dance in clogs – and looking back on that crazy night I have no idea how my bare feet weren’t cut to ribbons on the dance floor. Now that I’ve seen the Devizes clog dancers in action, though, it’s struck me that I could have saved myself the cloakroom fee. 🙄

My clogs were traditional Dutch-style; slip-on, not with laces like these. I’m glad these ladies DID have laces for theirs, though - can you imagine one of these slabs of footwear flying through the crowd if a kick had gone awry? OUCHIE!

Well, I’m sure you spotted those umbrellas in that jolly video, and a few days off in July just wouldn’t count as a British holiday if it weren’t for the rain, would it, Terry? We had a couple of lovely walks along the towpath of the Kennet & Avon canal, both of which started in glorious sunshine and ended in a shower. All was not lost: on that second occasion we’d made it to the canalside pub just as the rain started, and by the time we’d enjoyed a couple of drinks and a plate of food each we were relaxed enough not to notice quite how very wet the walk back to the campsite was making us.

Granted, I’d’ve got rather less wet had I not stopped to video these ripples for you, but here’s what a British July looks and sounds like when the contents of the sky repeatedly hit the surface of a canal:

Walking along that towpath reminded me of those brilliant family holidays I spent as a child aboard a succession of hired narrowboats. Any trip overseas for leisure wouldn’t be much of a holiday for Dad, a long-haul pilot, and a sedate week every October spent chugging along a British inland waterway at a slow and steady 4mph was the welcome antithesis to Dad’s working life spent at a hundred and fifty times that speed.²

On the walk home along the towpath I remembered our approach to finding an overnight mooring on those holidays. Not for us a convenient stretch of the bank located close to the nearest pub, absolutely not. Instead, we’d moor in the middle of nowhere, out of sight of roads, railways, buildings, streetlights or indeed even any other boats. As I’m sure you can imagine, finding such a spot was an afternoon’s work in itself: we’d motor on, sometimes for hours, until we found the perfect place to spend the night.

One night, already pretty late, bearing in mind that hire boats aren’t permitted to be underway in the dark, we’d moored close to a bridge. Settling down for the evening we all became aware of a noise of heavy breathing which became louder and louder. We looked at each other, alarmed.

And then:

‘STEAM TRAIN!’ one of us yelled, and we flung ourselves out through the hatch and onto the rear deck to catch a glimpse of it. Yes, a beautiful heritage locomotive was puffing its way across the bridge, its plume of steam ribboning out behind it in the twilight. Terry, it was magical.

I can’t actually remember whether we had then cast off from that mooring to motor on to one further from the bridge, but I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if we had.

Those holidays were exhausting, but wonderful. Dad would usually be at the tiller, consulting the relevant Nicholson Guide³ and making a note in his log⁴ of bridge numbers, locks and swing bridges as we passed them.

(No, I don’t know how we’d missed that that had been a railway bridge, either.)

My brother and I would be in charge of the locks: Dad would nose the boat into the bank a few hundred yards ahead, and we would jump off, each clutching a windlass, run to the lock and start opening the paddles. We’d wait for the lock to fill – or empty, depending on how it was set, and whether we were locking up or locking down – and as soon as the water levels were near to equal we’d leeeeeeean against the gates to push them open.

With the boat in the lock, we’d have to catch the forward and aft ropes and loop them around the bollards and back into the boat so that the boat sat securely against one of the steep sides before we closed the gates and opened the other pair of paddles.

Photo by Andrew Hall on Unsplash

As soon as the boat was out of the lock, Dad would motor towards the bank and in a heart-in-mouth moment we’d step, jump or leap back on board, depending on how close to the bank he’d got. To this day I have no idea how neither of us ever fell in.

Even now the smell of diesel will make me think of holidays. It’s never the exotic scent of jasmine, the aroma of pizza or the smell of the sea that transports me to places I’ve been. No, Terry: it’s diesel, always diesel.

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While we were away, my good mate C sent me this screenshot of something he’d found on Twitter:

‘Jaw’ made me laugh immediately, but I really had to think about the next one. It took a while to dawn on me that ‘Murder’ is the collective noun for crows… Hey, playing this game clearly called for some lateral thinking!

For a couple of days it seemed there was no end to the mirth as we bounced our own suggestions for depluralised film titles back and forth – some simple, like the first example in the screenshot, some rather more clever. Here’s a selection of my favourites – what do you think?

Catch-1⁵

Chitty Bang⁶

Life of One⁷

Lion and Prejudice⁸

Of Mouse and Man⁹

Star War: The Country Strikes Back¹⁰

The Addam Person¹¹

The Lion, the Witch and the Coat Hook¹²

The Single Sense¹³

Trree Gump¹⁴

I’d love to hear any suggestions you’ve got for depluralised film titles, Terry! Do share!

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In other news: there had been less rain at home than in Devizes, and my runner beans, already slowcoaches, had ground to a halt in my absence. On my arrival back I’d set aside an hour to water the garden, and was pleased that a thundery eight-hour downpour meant that that job was taken care of for me. That was the weekend, Terry, and it’s still raining now…

Still, it’s nice weather for those ducks, eh?

All the very best, as always,

Rebecca

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If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! I’ll see you on Saturday for the next post in my ‘Art & Treasures’ series.

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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1. ‘Devices and desires’ is the title of a detective novel by PD James, which she’d taken from this line in the Book of Common Prayer: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”.

2. A member of the same Boeing 747 family, the 747-400 is a behemoth that can catapult 416 passengers across the world with a maximum speed of Mach 0.855 (656 mph). With a range of up to 7,225 nautical miles, it's most commonly used for busy long-haul routes with high demand.
Taken from Nerdwallet.com

3. The Nicholson Guides are a set of books originally published by Robert Nicholson Publications, then jointly by Bartholomew and the Ordnance Survey, and now by HarperCollins, as guides to the navigable and un-navigable waterways of England and Wales (and, more recently, Scotland).

The large-scale Guides were mainly intended for people traveling by boat along the river or canal, but now include a number of non-navigable waterways. Generally, each page includes a map of a section of the waterway with features such as bridges, locks, boatyards and services. Each section of the map includes references to nearby pubs, towns and villages, roads and railways.

Taken from Wikipedia

4. Dad kept a log of every single trip. I wonder if he still has them? For each day, on one side of a two-page spread of his notebook he’d keep a line-by-line note of the numbers marked on every bridge and lock that we passed through, and on the other, a full write-up of the day’s events. Newsflash: yes, we are related. 😉

5. My take on “Catch-22”

6. “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, courtesy of Jim

7. “Life of Pi”. C has kindly simplified the maths for us by dividing the title by 3.14 (and then some)

8. “Pride and Prejudice”, by C

9. “Of Mice and Men”, by C

10. “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back” with fewer states involved. This one’s mine

11. My rather lonelier version of “The Addams Family”

12. Sorry, C S Lewis, but I prefer my title for “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. Less floor space is required, for one thing

13. My version of “The Sixth Sense”. I don’t know if I’d fallen asleep part way through watching this amazing film, but I had to have the twist EXPLAINED TO ME at the end. 😳 When I watched it again I couldn’t believe how I’d missed it!

14. C’s new title for one of my favourite films, “Forrest Gump”. Yes, the spelling of ‘trree’ is deliberate