Letter to Rebecca #1

An exercise in epistolary writing

Rainy road, by Terry Freedman

This is my reply to Rebecca, who wrote her first Substack letter to me a few days ago. If you missed it you can read it here:

33: Letters to Terry - 1 of 3

If you do not wish to miss her reply to me, or any other of her letters and other posts, subscribe to her newsletter. Ditto mine.

Dear Rebecca

How lovely to hear from you! It’s interesting that the good people at Substack came up with this letters idea, because literally just a few days before the announcement I’d started a course on epistolary fiction. Only a two session course, but it was dead interesting. One of the novels we looked at was Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple. The parts we read are hilarious. Have you ever read that book? I picked it up from the library on Thursday, and am looking forward to curling up with it on these dank and dreary nights.

Speaking of which…

So typically English, choosing the weather as our first topic! The writer Ephraim Kishon once wrote that England gets four seasons just like everywhere else, but usually in the same day. So you walk out of your abode in glorious sunshine, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and flip-flops, and by lunchtime you’re being submerged by torrential rain.

I think this could be avoided either by lugging around a holdall containing clothes for every conceivable climate, or by listening to the weather forecast. I don’t because half the time I can’t understand it. I’m not interested in isotherms or cold fronts. I just need to know what to wear. I saw a great spoof weather forecast in the USA once. It consisted of the presenter saying things like: “Hey, on Thursday it’s gonna be cold, so wear a pullover: don’t be a big shot.” That’s about my level!

Have you ever been to Glasgow, Scotland? Rains all the time there.

An alleyway in Glasgow, by Terry Freedman

An American once stopped a child in the street and asked if it ever stopped raining. The boy replied “How should I know? I’m only 4”. That joke was told to me by a Glaswegian!

However, I think that the changeability of our weather is an advantage, because it acts as an ice-breaker. Just about every day I, or someone else, strikes up a conversation with a remark such as one of the following, depending on the prevailing conditions:

• Nice weather – if you’re a duck.

• Lovely isn’t it? I missed summer last year because I overslept that day.

• It’s far too hot. Why doesn’t anywhere have air conditioning like they do in the USA?

• Thank goodness it’s cooler: the air conditioning was making such a racket I couldn’t hear myself think!

I used to live on the 9th floor of a block of flats. Every time I got into the lift on the 9th floor, the people in there were moaning about the state of the lift and the Council (“Why do we pay our taxes?”). By the time the lift reached the ground floor, everyone was whingeing about the weather. On the return journey, this sequence was reversed: it was the weather until approximately floor 5, and then the lifts and the Council.

I don’t have any trouble with my Muse most of the time. In fact, I’ve given her the day off as it’s a bit cold. So you sit like a little old lady with a blanket over your knees? Elaine has a heated pad that she has to use. When we go out sometimes people stare at us because we look like we’re in two climate zones: she dressed in a hat, gloves, scarf and three overcoats, me in a t-shirt and shorts. Her nose is colour-coded too: it turns red when the temperature drops below a certain level. As for gaiters, I hadn’t even heard of them before I read your letter. I don’t think I’ll be buying a set any time soon. Useful to know about though.

Please don’t use the expression “White Christmas”. It brings to mind the films Holiday Inn and Help, which seem to be the only things shown on TV during this period. 

Mind you, I like it when it has snowed: I like that crispness in the air.

Your mentioning Christmas get-togethers brought back happy memories of lockdown. It was so nice to not receive invitations to parties or to have to host any family dinners ourselves. Just joshin’, I’m not really an antisocial twit. Although I do think Oscar Wilde was on to something when he said “After dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”

I don’t actually mind the rain, although have you noticed that some rain is wetter than other types? I know it sounds nuts but it’s true. There’s a certain type of drizzle that just somehow seems to get inside you and make you damp from the inside out.

Have you ever considered that rain has to stop somewhere? My mother once described to me how, as a little girl, she and her friends spent the afternoon running in and out of the rain, because in one half of their street it was dry and in the other half it was raining. LOL

You’ve come up with a couple of brilliant expressions: the roast potato one, and this:

“Each charge took a whole cup of tea’s worth of time to accomplish.”

Serious question coming up: have you ever considered pitching your work to a magazine, or a commercial newsletter of some sort (I’m sure the Ramblers Association must have one, and you seem to ramble a lot….) But joking aside, do it!

The Scots (again!) have a word to a describe the sort of weather we’re experiencing now, especially in the evenings: dreich, pronounced with a guttural ‘ch’. It means dull and gloomy. Isn’t it onomatopoeic? Sometimes I like it. If I’m on holiday in a country-ish location, I love the quietude, and I very much enjoy that feeling of tiredness and feeling it dissipate as you drink the first cup of tea in several hours.

A few years ago I went on holiday to Southwold, a seaside resort – in December. The cold, the storms, the lashing down of rain, the wind along the shoreline – fantastic!

I used to hate sport at school, but the one aspect I did enjoy was doing cross-country running over Wormwood Scrubs in cold, rainy, blustery weather. Weird, I know, but I used to love it.

Yet when I was teaching, and living on my own, my friends miles away, and between girlfriends, the same weather, especially on a Sunday evening when the only company I had was a huge pile of marking, was pretty depressing. I usually went into London at such times, but sometimes it simply wasn’t feasible. Teachers call that time – 6-ish on a Sunday evening – ‘death hour’!

The worst aspect of this weather is, I think, the damp. Writers such as P.B. Shelley and K. Mansfield tried to escape by going to southern Europe, but still succumbed to TB. Several years ago I had a chesty cold that just wouldn’t go. I had it for two years. Then I went to a conference in San Diego and a couple of friends invited me to visit them in Phoenix. The temperature there was, at one point, 118 F, but it was a dry heat, not the awful humid heat we tend to get here. I was there for a week, and it completely cleared up my cold. Amazing.

Near where I live there have been some ‘improvements’ made to the local infrastructure.  The pavement has been widened, taking absolutely no account of the drainage situation (see pics below).

Thus every time it rains the bus stop becomes virtually impassable because of the huge puddles that now form after rain, but which didn’t appear before. This is a clear example of what Stephen Potter, in his book Supermanship, referred to as ‘the petrification of the implied opposite’.

The opposite is true

I suspect that what this so-called improvement was really about was that a section of the local council had some spare money at the end of the financial year, and a few boxes still unticked on their five year plan. One of these was no doubt ‘improve pedestrian access’ in which case making the pavement wider would deal with that and soak up the excess money. The wider pavement is nice, but it’s a shame that ‘avoid flooding’ wasn’t one of the boxes.

Perhaps that’s what we could moan about next time, Rebecca? Box-ticking? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Onward and upward!

All the best

Terry