Reply to Rebecca #23

Tea unceremoniously

Dear Rebecca

In your letter, for which I thank you, you asked:

What advice might you have for a young lady (of 27, according to the newspaper cutting you enclosed with your last letter) meeting an internet acquaintance for the first time in real life? How should the two of them, for example, go about ordering tea in a café? If her date is anything like you I can only imagine the stand-off.

Unfortunately, our meeting arrived before I could answer, so imagine how mortified I was when, in one of the most upmarket cafés Elaine and I could find, you suddenly whipped out a teabag.

“Ho, varlet”, you screeched across the room to a waiter. “Bring me a container of hot water and a mug at once. And a plate of your finest comestibles.”

When the waiter started to say, “Madame, unfortunately —” you said “Don’t give me that. I know my rights.”

Elaine and I didn’t know where to put ourselves. And what was Jim doing all this time? Taking photos and muttering, “They’re gonna love this”, “I think the Teabag Times will take this one”, and “This is going look great in my true life story, ‘Scandal in Starbucks’.”

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It’s a terrible tragedy about the Sycamore Gap but somehow unsurprising. Words fail me.

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It’s nice that you get to visit all those lovely places. But what a lot of faff and planning and driving. I’ve set up a back projection unit in our lounge. It means we can play a film of, say, the coast of Florida, and it feels like we’re actually there. No need to even step outside the front door. We’ve even got sound effects records to go with the films. Marvellous.

Your mention of Hadrian’s Wall reminded me of a headline a few years ago when the Magna Carta was being taken to various countries:

Magna Carta hits great wall in China

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I’m glad you like my approach to proofreading and editing. Lots of writers bang on about the importance of good editing — in advance. Baloney. By the time you’ve got it perfect the readers have lost interest and moved on. Much better, I think, to adopt the Frank O’Connor approach. He would bash out a story in four hours in order to make sure he got it all down while it was fresh — and would then edit over and over again. In some cases he revised the story fifty times, even after it had been published in a collection. So much so that if you are in a reading group studying O’Connor’s stories, you have to make sure that everyone has the same version.

Oh, and by the way: lunch is for wimps. I stop for lunch after I have written an article. The idea of it serves as an incentive to finish as soon as possible.

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Did I tell you that because of my phenomenal prolificacy I have had to install a new computer? Here it is:

ENIAC. U.S. Army Photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Picture credit for Eniac: This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain. URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eniac.jpg

It takes a bit of getting used to but we’re very pleased with it.

And on that note, may I say: enough of this persiflage, and I look forward to hearing your account of our historic meeting last week.

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Peeps, to make sure you see Rebecca’s reply next Wednesday, make sure you subscribe to her lovely newsletter:

All the best

Terry