Letter to Rebecca #7

My reply

Feb 23, 2023

Dear Rebecca

My idea of romanticism

Thank you for your lovely letter. Before I go any further, I should like to draw your attention to the photograph above. It was taken inside a station — Westminster, if my memory serves me well. You, Rebecca, take beautiful photos of country scenes, and I have to say I, being a romantic at heart, love a nice landscape or seascape.

However, I also like industrial landscapes and urban settings. Indeed, one of my favourite poems is A Calvinist in Love, by Jack Clemo. None of all that wishy-washy lovey-dovey stuff that 15 year-old girls like to write (or so I’ve heard), but proper, manly stuff. I mean check this out:

I care no more for fickle moonlight:
Would rather see
Your face touch me
Under a claywork dune-light.

Now that’s what I call romantic. You can read the rest of it here:

A Calvinist in Love, by Jack Clemo.

I mention this because not only was your letter to me written on graph paper — graph paper! — but you added insult to injury by telling me you wouldn’t send me scented letters. Actually, I’m quite pleased because I’d have a hard time explaining that:

Elaine: Oh yeah?

Me: Just another letter from a besotted fan, dear. It’s the price one pays for fame.

Apologies

I’m sorry this letter is a day late. Yesterday was quite fraught. A few days ago I had a very traumatic experience: I ran out tea. More precisely, I ran out of decent tea. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t gamble and I don’t womanise (come to think of it, what a boring existence). My one indulgence is decent tea.

As I had to go into London anyway because I’d been invited to an Authors Awards evening, I thought I’d buy some tea and get a haircut. Actually, I got them all cut as it seemed silly going for just one. Back to the Awards: I wasn’t one of the recipients or even shortlisted, but then I haven’t written a book recently and so my unwritten book wasn’t submitted.

I needed a haircut pretty desperately. See below for before and after pictures:

Terry’s hair before and after haircut. Drawing by Terry Freedman

I took a couple of photos of the tea situation:

Left: Indecent tea; Right: Decent tea Terry Freedman — Left: Indecent tea; Right: Decent tea Pics by Terry Freedman

It’s quite obvious that the tea on the left started out life as floor sweepings, but that someone had the brilliant idea of putting it into packets labelled “Assam Tea”. I had to survive for a whole day on that muck. I needed a tea transfusion once I arrived home last night.

Then this morning I had to take my brother to the vet for a blood test. The girls there were saying to each other “Ooh, isn’t he gorgeous, he’s lovely”. It took me a few minutes to realise they were talking about the cat. Willow is the one on the right in the picture below:

Minty, Mocha and Willow, by Terry Freedman

On the subject of cats, I am no longer on speaking terms with our two female cats. One (Mocha) lies on me at night, thereby pinning me down. The other (Minty) uses me as a trampoline. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I momentarily left the butter dish uncovered the other day, and the next thing I knew Minty’s snout was in it.

Well, I put my foot down. Look, I said to Elaine, either they go or I do.

I’ve just finished packing.

Get packing

Which reminds me. I enjoyed reading about your packing list and how you forgot some essentials. Well, as I mentioned in a comment on that post, I once forgot the suitcase itself. It is an important lesson to learn: always include the case.

Now, about my profile…

Now, one does not wish to come across as a whinger, but I have a complaint. Your silhouette, which was very deftly drawn — was that meant to be me? Because it looks like you have somehow failed to capture my dynamism, the remorseless precision of my profile. Oh well.

Spring is in the air

Spring definitely is springing. I loved your recording of a robin singing. We have a friendly robin in our garden. He waits until I’ve filled up the birdfeeders, then comes out and has a good scoff. We bumped into someone in a local park a few years ago who was feeding a robin by hand. He said that he goes to the park at the same time every day and the robin comes out to meet him in order to be fed nuts and raisins. Nice, isn’t it?

We have daffodils springing up, which reminds me: were you force fed Daffodils, the poem, in school? I was. Did you know that Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy used to accompany him on his rambles, and take notes which Billie later relied on to write his stuff. He was devoted to her apparently, but we don’t hear much about her role do we?

I’m not a great lover of that poem anyway, and believe it was much improved by Mad Magazine’s version: “I wandered lonely as a clod”:

I wandered lonely as a clod,
Just picking up old rags and bottles,
When onward on my way I plod,
I saw a host of axolotls;

You can read the rest here: I wandered lonely as a clod.

Puddlegate

For the benefit of newcomers to this correspondence (to whom I should like to say: you do realise it’s rude to read other people’s post, right?), here is a quick pictorial recap of the drainage situation at my local bus stop, all of which has been carefully documented in my letters (an index for which may be found online — see the link towards the end of this letter):

The situation now is that the scope of the puddle has been reduced, but there is still a problem, as amply demonstrated by this video:

How to read

Mary Tabor, of Only Connect, has kindly published a guest post of mine on the subject of how to read efficiently. It mainly applies to nonfiction but do check it out (and to anyone else reading this, have a good rummage around the rest of Mary’s site).