Letter to Rebecca #24-21

21 Today, 21 today 🎶🎶

Dear Rebecca

Thank you for your delightful letter. We have now reached number 21 which, being the age by which people are assumed to have grown up, suggests that perhaps we should be sensible and serious from now on. How boring!

Greens

I've always loved Brussels sprouts and could never understand why hardly anyone else did, but one day Elaine explained: many people boil them to the extent that they lose all taste and, indeed, any resemblance to a vegetable at all. Your anecdote appears to bear this out. However, the mention of "green" reminded me, for some unfathomable reason, of a brief period in which a friend of mine at university bought a bottle of blue food dye, and subsequently rendered every cooked dish the colour blue. Have you ever seen blue tomato soup? Or blue mashed potatoes? I made the mistake once of accepting his offer of a cup of tea. It was unnerving. It's quite astonishing, although perhaps it shouldn't be, that if our colour expectations are confounded it throws us into some disarray. To say I was discombobulated would be to be guilty of understatement.

Cheating

When it was my turn to assume the role of banker while my sister, mother and I played Monopoly, I would be the recipient of unbridled opprobrium. I was studying Economics at the time, and so I naturally pursued a policy of fiscal restraint. What this meant in practice was that I would only extend loans to those I considered credit-worthy, ie myself. They didn't let me be banker very often.

Headlines

Thank you for sharing that great headline:

The world jigsaw championships left me in pieces.

As a rule, the headlines to an article are written by a sub-editor, not the person who wrote the article, which is why headlines occasionally bear very little relationship to the report itself. Writing headlines is, I think, a much under-appreciated form of creative writing. For example, who can doubt the brilliance of (as seen in the Daily Telegraph) the following?

Orange growers squeezed by rising costs.

Magna Carta faces great wall in China (from when Magna Carta was on tour around the world).

In Keith Waterhouse's book 'On Newspaper style", there is a 'wonderful list of "tabloidese", in which ordinary words and terms are rendered far more dramatic.

For instance,

Annoyance becomes outrage;

Bad luck becomes jinx;

Criticise becomes slam;

Disagreement becomes clash;

and so on. Of course, such terms are not neutral, so when the word "resign" becomes "quit" or "storm out", a radically different impression is conveyed.

Unicorn slices

6 word reviews

I enjoyed solving your 6-word review challenges, which were:

'Jury' justice off the rails. Retribution.

Cruisers encounter crime chaos. Christie caper!

My answers:

Murder on the Orient Express

Death on the Nile

I have a difficult one for you:

They dictate, but they can't write!

Nominative determinism

What a hoot! It's definitely a well-known phenomenon. I wonder if there's a logical reason though. For example, the surname Carpenter presumably derives from one's forebears being carpenters.

Reading matters

I'm surprised that an erudite and literate person such as yourself has not read Brave New World. It's a great book, I'm sure you will enjoy it.

I'm reading a book called Hitler's People, and one called Literary Journeys. I'm enjoying both of them, for different reasons.

Well, that's enough from me, Becks. Looking forward to your reply, as ever.

PS Did you see in the Telegraph that someone had her job application letter returned fifty years after posting it? Apparently it had fallen behind a filing cabinet in the postal sorting office. If you don't receive a bathday card from me, blame the Post Office!

PPS I sometimes doodle while I am writing articles by hand. Here’s a screenshot of a couple of doodles I did for this.

All the best

Terry

To anyone reading this missive, you can see the whole archive here. Rebecca should reply next Wednesday, so make sure you don’t miss that by subscribing to hers.

Thanks for reading!