Earlier this month I was moved to write, again, to The Times. (see PC 292 Dear Sir (1) July 2022 for the first collection)
January 2023
“Sir ….. I read with interest the French post office’s ideas for future first-class letters, writing on their website your ‘letter’, which is then printed off in the appropriate local post office, put in an envelope and delivered.
Wedded as I am to cursive script, I have a different 2023 solution. I write my bread-and-butter Thank You letters as normal, photograph them with my mobile phone, and send them free via WhatsApp. This is an instant first class solution, although my local postie Steve might disagree!”
So for this week’s postcard I have reprinted some of my previous efforts to get published nationally! Where necessary I have added a little explanation if the relevance isn’t clear or the passage of time causes me to add my own comment!
9th November 2020
“Sir …… At the abbreviated (Covid-constrained) Remembrance Sunday service yesterday, the Bishop of London, as part of her prayers, remembered those who had given their lives for their country. It struck me that this should have been changed to ‘our country’?”
Now I am in conflict! They died fighting for the United Kingdom but they might well have come from Commonwealth countries so maybe it’s correct?
Much newsprint was naturally given to the international fight against Covid.
21st April 2020
“Sir ……. In yesterday’s edition you showed a bar chart indicating Covid 19 patient outcomes but it failed to have bar for the 70-74 age group. At 73, should I be worried by its omission?
14th April 2020
“Sir ….. Ben Macintyre, in yesterday’s article ‘Virus reawakens class conflict ….’, highlights the divisions in global society but suggests that these divisions exposed by the disease are reinforced by race. His ’35 per cent of our critically ill people were from a BAME background, despite making up only 14% of the population’ stands as a fact and nothing more. You surely can’t draw any conclusion without knowing much more?
Time Zones often cause confusion!
13th February 2020
“Sir ……..In an article about Sinn Fein’s Irish poll success (Times 11th Feb 2020) there was a little embedded box about changes to the EU Times Zones. It rightly stated that an EU Commission has proposed an end to the biannual changing of the clocks ……. but you confused the story by saying that the EU switches back to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on the last Sunday of October. Currently the EU (less Portugal and Ireland) is on Central European Time (CET), adds an hour for Central European Summer Time and then reverts back to CET and not GMT. Here in the UK we move from GMT to British Summer Time and back to GMT. Clear as mud huh!”
19th August 2019
“Sir …. A recent letter from HMRC was addressed to me as Mr RC Yates, but the salutation read “Dear Sir/Madam”. Maybe they had recognised that I live in the city of Brighton & Hove and were covering my future options!”
6th October 2018
“Sir ……. Elizabeth Smith’s letter, ‘Useful First Words’ 4th October, mentioned a report that the first word the Queen Mother had learnt to spell was ptarmigan. It reminded me of the story from an Alaskan village called ‘Chicken’. The settlement, started during the Gold Rush years, grew to such an extent that it warranted a name. Everyone agreed it should be called after the local bird, the ptarmigan. When no one offered to spell it correctly, they opted for ‘Chicken’ instead!” (See PCs 44 and 45 about our trip to Alaska in 2015)
16th May 2019
“Sir …… Helen Rumbelow’s piece on the osteopath Nick Potter, Times 2 15 May 19, was fascinating. His main assertion seems to be that pain in simply in the brain. I concur! If I stub my toe, my toe hurts. If I bend down to rub it and hit my head, it’s only my head that hurts! Mind you, being male, I can only concentrate on one thing at once.”
21st September 2018
“Sir …… As a nation with as deep and rich naval heritage as ours, surely we can get the nomenclature right. The article in today’s Times concerning the death of an Australian on a Mexican billionaire’s yacht referred to the boat’s back and not its stern. And while we are at it, the pointy bit in the front is the bow.”
| In a similar vein, two years earlier on 27th June 2016 |
“Sir …….. I do wish you would take more care with your descriptions of photographs. Back in May this year you captioned a photograph indicating that Putney was downriver of Tower Bridge, whereas of course by convention it is upriver. Today you show the yachts before the start of the Round The World Clipper Race up river of Tower Bridge, facing upriver, and yet the caption says “Approaching Tower Bridge” – backwards?”
17th January 2018
“Sir ……. After Tom Whipple’s negative piece in Friday’s Times about Bikram/hot yoga being no better for you than ordinary yoga, now Kevin Mahler in today’s Times believes that everyone doing it farts all the time! So now it’s smelly and “frequently practised naked”! Really! What a load of rubbish and unbecoming of the standard expected of The Times. Why can’t they accept that millions of people around the world embrace yoga, in its many forms, on a daily basis and here in the UK the more we can encourage people to do some form of exercise, any form of exercise, the better?
Whilst I appreciate Mahler tried ordinary yoga, maybe they should both take a 90 minute hot yoga session, and then pass judgement”
24th November 2017
“Sir ……. Carol Midgley can’t see what’s wrong with spooning jam straight from the pot onto toast (Times 2 22 Nov). Then goes on to compound her problem by suggesting it’s better than ‘putting a disgusting butter-smeared knife into the jam’. No one wants butter in the jam or vice versa. The simple solution is to put the butter onto one’s plate with a ‘butter knife’ and the jam onto one’s plate with a spoon. Then you can lather your toast anyway you wish.”
Richard 13th January 2023
postcards 