Month: April 2026

PC 488 Hope – WhatsApp with Sami

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This week we’ve been in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires and we flew back to Rio de Janeiro today. I will obviously devote next week’s postcard to our time in ‘BA’, the city founded in 1536 by Pedro de Mendoza, who named the fort and port settlement after ‘Nuestra Señora Santa Maria del Buen Aire’, a patroness of sailors, venerated by Spanish sailors to ensure safe voyages. The translation means ‘fair winds’ or ‘good air’. Yesterday I managed a video WhatsApp call with Sami, who was sitting in the Hope Café in Hove; there is a four-hour time difference.

“Hey! Richard! Good to see you! You’ve already caught the sun, but that nose of yours is always red, as opposed to suntanned!!”

“Funny! I have lived with this nose for a long time and yes, it never goes brown. Used to peel a great deal when sailing, salt water and sun always detrimental to the skin! Just have to live with it or walk around with it covered in zinc ointment; not a good look. (See alsoPC 190 ‘Up My Nose!’ August 2020.)”

“Talking of noses, did you see that article in the Times about our concept of pain, and the illustration of a nail up someone’s nose?”

“Remind me?”

“According to the psychologist Rachel Zoffness (Note 1), pain ‘is rooted in a mix of biological, psychological and social factors. This biopsychosocial model views symptoms as more than the mere sum of damaged tissue’.”

“We’ve all suffered pain, often so excruciating one needs a  strong pain killer. I remember before my L4/L5 microdiscectomy on my back I was offered gabapentin. I took one, felt awful and never took another. You mentioned a nail up someone’s nose? Do you have a photo?”

“The Times article had one of the X-ray of Patrick Lawler’s skull. A labourer in Colorado, Lawler had inadvertently banged himself in the face with a nail gun. He thought nothing of it but 6 days later had a vague toothache. The dentist’s X-ray showed a 10cm nail up his nostril, buried in his brain. Zoffness contrasted this story with one of a builder in the UK in 1995, who’d stepped on a 15cm nail that had gone all the way through his boot and out the top. He was in such pain the hospital sedated him with fentanyl and midazolam. Yet when they cut away his boot, the doctors found the nail hadn’t touched his foot at all.”

“Ah! He automatically thought when he saw the tip of the nail that it had gone through his foot and this triggered an automatic psychological pain response. Wow! I always told my clients that we can only focused on one thing at once and illustrated this by saying: ‘If you stub your toe, your toe hurts. You bend down to rub your toe and bang you head on a table; what hurts? Your head!’”

“What’s that T-shirt you’re wearing? What does it say?”

“It says: “Teachers – The Original Influencers” and it was seen in a school in Zimbabwe by Benedicte Deutsch. Benedicte is a wonderful example of doing something you think you could. She was over 50 when she decided to become a Paramedic here in Sussex. She needed to do a year upgrading some of her French qualifications, then a three-year degree before she could put on the green uniform. She’s been assisting people in stressful situations in Worthing ever since, but last summer she spent three weeks volunteering in Africa. Hence the T-shirt.

“Is what you’re wearing from Zimbabwe?”

“No! She told me about it; I thought it would be fun to sketch it out and have one printed off, especially as my daughter’s been teaching for decades. Incidentally Sami, Brighton & Hove is such a diverse city, isn’t it? Just love living here.”

“And you’re making this statement because ….

“We use the bus most weekdays to go to yoga and regularly see a couple of chaps who clearly live in a different world, inside their heads. Often we see one, but the other morning saw both. They are amiable, non-offensive and live in a very musical world, often singing the lyrics to some well-known song quietly to themselves, over and over again …. not afraid of eye contact, always polite and say ‘good morning’ then retreat, back into their head. I sometimes wonder whether I should miss my 1000 class and stay on the bus, to understand what their day will be like, where they will go, who they will meet. Maybe they go to the same place ……”

“Didn’t I read somewhere, and given your military background you could confirm this, that a senior officer wrote in one of his subordinate’s annual Confidential Report: ‘His soldiers follow him, but only out of curiosity.’? Maybe your own curiosity will dictate missing yoga one morning.”

“Maybe it will Sami. You and Lisa got a holiday planned this summer?”

“Huh! We were planning a couple of weeks in May in Dubai. Never seen the place, have friends who live there and love it. However ……”

“You going to mention the conflict with Iran?”

“We’ve booked to go to Sicily instead. A little safer, although everyone else seems to have the same idea and it’s getting quite booked up, although we’re going before the schools close, so it’ll be OK!”

“And before I end the call, Sami, must tell you that the most exciting piece of mail I got just before we left Hove was a letter from HMG’s Department for Work & Pensions, informing me of ‘the general increase in benefits’ I will receive in the new Tax Year. In the small print at the bottom, I was delighted to read that I would also have an extra 25pence per week from my 80th Birthday.”

“Lucky you. The generosity of The State! See you next month. Safe travels.”

“Indeed!”

Richard 25th April 2026

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 ‘Tell where it hurts: The Science of Pain and how to heal’ by Rachel Zoffness

PC 487 The High Street

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They’re in your face, aren’t they, the boarded-up shop fronts and the ‘for sale’ signs that litter our ‘High Street’. Doorways once a busy entry and exit point now where the sadly homeless can doss down. A sign of urban decay if ever there was one; and in the back of my mind the images of Detroit, once home to the United States’ automotive industry and now just one of many rusting and run-down areas. So, what’s the new normal?

Living in Brighton & Hove we have examples of every sort of commercial enterprise, and some are not surviving. It doesn’t require a degree in economics to understand that the financial pressures of high Business Rates, levied by the local council, and unstainable increases in rent from absent landlords are just two of the factors. Many retailers argue that the current rates systems unfairly penalise physical stores compared with online retailers. Another factor will simply be the rising costs of running a business, like those of energy, rents, and minimum wage hikes.

But the change in the way we buy goods, from going into a physical store to logging onto a website, ordering what we want and having it delivered home or to the office, is irreversible. Those who clamour for the authorities to ‘Bring back the High Street’ have to realise it will not have the same ‘pre-internet shopping’ look.

Five minutes from where I live, out of choice in a town rather than in the countryside where the whole issue is completely different, I found:

The Flower Stall’s tucked into an outside corner of a deconsecrated church, itself another change to the urban look. You can buy flowers on-line, for instance from Freddie’s Flowers, but particularly for the impulse purchase, this is great.

Our dentist’s practice is across the road; you cannot have a dental checkup online! They are around the corner from Ben, an acupuncturist we use; he charges 50% more for an online session.

Along Church Road we find a traditional butcher, Canham & Sons, which does a roaring trade, both for its meat and poultry products, and at lunchtime for its pies, pasties and sausage rolls. For vegans the all-invasive smell of meat means giving it a wide berth.

A private doctors’ practice (The Hove Practice) is popular with those finding getting a GP’s appointment difficult and wanting medical advice in a day or so.

It sits opposite the Osbon Pharmacy, so those needing a prescription can simply walked across Church Road.

Delicate discussions about the choice of a coffin, flowers and other funeral arrangements just cannot be conducted online, so Attree & Kent, part of CPJ Field, is an essential part of our High Street. This company was established in 1690 and has been run by the Field family for 10 generations. There is no shortage of customers!

Another generational story is Timpson where you talk to Adam, get another set of keys cut, impossible online: a new sole for your favourite shoes or a passport photo needed in a hurry. Online? Nah!

When the family’s been to stay, a laundry service is essential and Essame’s Bubbles provides just that, although it would benefit from a ‘u’ and a ‘r’!

But the new-look High Street is personified by pedestrianised, 200m long, George Street.

Gail’s sits at the bottom, the first of many bakery and coffee shops – a sign of what the public want, if they can afford the cost of a Mocha or Latte.

And if you don’t want something or need some cash to tide you over until payday, go to the pawnbrokers.

Yes! Yes! I know, you can read an e-book, or you can order books from many online stores, but isn’t there something very grounding, just browsing in a bookshop like Waterstones, picking up a paperback, attracted enough by its cover to read a review??

I don’t get my nails ‘done’, well, not yet, but understand the current fashion ….. and here’s another service you can’t do online. But do we need so many? In George Street alone there are eight!

Whilst you can buy non-prescription glasses online, as I did through ThinOptics for some standard, extremely lightweight, reading glasses, you need to see a real optician to have your eyes regularly checked.

My love/hate with individual tattoos continues. When I was in the Army there was a snobbery about tattoos, officers never dreaming of having one, seeing them as very working class. Often if a senior Non-commissioned Officer was elevated to some commissioned rank, they invariably tried to remove any visible tattoos they had; removing tattoos has apparently got easier. I sense some people get them when drunk or under peer pressure and years later wish they hadn’t. In 2026 Brighton & Hove the rapid increase in their popularity is evident, although some I find repulsive and not in the least attractive; the black ‘sleeve’ tattoo is one.

I used to smoke, even when I knew that there was a causal link between cigarettes and lung cancer. My last cigarette was in March 1994 and whilst I still remember the delight of that first ‘drag’, I remain repulsed by someone else’s cigarette smoke and the reek of it on clothes, curtains and carpets. Vaping seems another world, 95% less harmful than smoking tobacco;100 puffs a day is the equivalent of smoking 7-10 cigarettes a day. Even so not healthy! George Street has three vape shops, most are empty of customers; one wonders if they are simply set up to launder the proceeds of criminal activity.

In addition to the three vape stores and eight nail bars, George Street has 5 charity outlets, for example Barnardo’s and the RSCPA, 8 phone shops and 14 cafes ….. and there are only 88 shopfronts in the whole street! The new High Street? Well, there is a bank branch!

Richard 17th April 2026

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS Regular readers please note next week’s postcard will not be in the post-box until late Saturday afternoon – assuming there’s a collection!

PC 486 Hope Revisited

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I got a WhatsApp from Mo to say her mother had had a rather nasty lung infection which developed into pneumonia and that she had died peacefully in her sleep. I offered the normal platitudes about how good to go without some awful illness, either physical like cancer or mental like dementia, how without her, her own life wouldn’t have existed but understood how much Mo would miss her. We agreed to meet in The Hope Café last Wednesday afternoon.

Josh is acting as the barista and we exchange inconsequential chat while he prepares my double espresso. I see Mo sitting at her favourite table and go and join her. We chat about the loss of one’s last parent, how now there’s no one in the family older than her and how she thought her mother had lived a good life, not merely existed. One of the facts of our existence is the older we get we recognise the thinning out of our friends and family. My brother had recently said goodbye to a very close ex-RN colleague, who had been in his term at Her Majesty’s Royal Naval College Dartmouth. I wrote: “As we age, our friends will gradually slip away – just hope we’re here to say: ‘thanks for your friendship’.”

Mo’s about to say something when her mobile rings. She looks down at the number, recognises it, says: “I need to take this, sorry; it’s the undertaker.” I quickly say, “I’ll let you have some privacy” and, without letting her protest, pick up my cup and move to another table, just as Sami enters.  

“Hi! Richard. Let me get an Americano and I’ll come and join you.”

Armed with his coffee, and a small plate of his favourite biscuits, he comes and sits down.

“Enjoyed your postcard about The Shipping Forecast (PC 483) Richard; for someone who’s never sailed, really interesting!”

“Richard Coles annoyed me a little, the ‘pedantic’ me I mean! When he was messing about in yachts off Cowes in his ‘Wight’ episode, he kept referring to the left and right of the boat, when I felt he could have made a little effort and used the well-known port and starboard.”

“He didn’t use ‘pointy bit’ for the ‘bow’ did he?”

“No! But he didn’t use ‘bow’ either, preferring ‘the front end’! Agh! Having not listened to the actual broadcast of the Shipping Forecast for a long time, I had a nostalgic listen the other day. You remember that Finisterre, an area of some 90,000 sq miles northwest of Cape Finisterre in Spain, was renamed Fitzroy? Well, in the forecast I heard, they split it into North and South Fitzroy. Maybe because it’s so large.”

“Did you get more comments than usual? I sense it was quite educational for some; certainly for me.”

“No, not really! Explorer 82 said: ‘A nice one’ but my brother, who lives on the coast in Weymouth, so sea area ‘Portland’, and who’s been suffering from a lingering chest infection sent this: “….. I have Connelly’s book and others including Meg Clothier’s The Shipping Forecast. Meanwhile – “General synopsis: deep low 360 (Note 1) Portland 6 filling slowly. Area forecasts …… Dover, Wight, Portland: gales of laughter in abeyance, fair I suppose, RSV brain fog lifting.”

Mo seems to have finished her call, comes over to tell us she needs to go and see him, the undertaker that is, and waves goodbye.

“Now, where were we? Oh! Yes, I was going to scream at the lack of common sense these days.

“Tell me more …..”

“The ‘i360 report’ by the Brighton & Hove City council explored what went wrong with the i360, the observation tower project that left the city writing off over £52million …… with no one held responsible. Last week’s report laid bare a basic problem; no ‘common sense’ checks. To sell the project, visitor numbers were estimated to be 700,000 per year. A child could do the maths: open 365 days a year, for an 8-hour day the attraction would need 239 per hour for every hour of the working day, seven days a week, even if it was raining or foggy. The capsule has a maximum capacity of 200 with about one trip per hour so it wasn’t realistically possible. No one dared to challenge the promoters; no one applied common sense.”

“That’s crazy, isn’t it. Can’t believe that figure of 700,000 wasn’t challenged. How many went up and down?”

“In the first year some 500,000 but it then averaged out around 270,000 per year. No one’s been held responsible and the city ratepayers are paying £2million a year in debt repayment.”

“I don’t think there’s a mechanism for holding leaders of public organisations financially accountable for the occasional cock-up. It would be a little like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas! On a different topic, you know how it is, when you see people away from where you normally see them and you think: “I sort of recognise them?” but can’t place them.”

“Oh! Yes! Context is everything.”

“On Wandsworth Common many years ago, I was walking my Labrador Tom and someone said: “Hi! Richard”. I seriously thought ‘who’s he?’, just couldn’t place him, then I realised it was Brian from Dove’s the local butcher, who always prepared my weekly pork chop wearing his blue-and-white striped apron!!! I was reminded of this the other day when we were rushing for the bus to get to yoga and passed a small group chatting and enjoying some coffee in the Spring sunshine. They shouted: ‘morning Celina’ and waved. Just couldn’t place them and it wasn’t until we got onto the bus that Celina said: “Didn’t you recognise Dr Simon, Martha the receptionist and the other doctors from The Hove Practice?”

“Ha! Ha! Hey, need to get going Richard. See you soon?”

“Off to Brazil next week so when we get back. Bye!”

Richard 10th April 2026

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 The number here refers to the barometric pressure. A ‘low’ pressure system is normally below 1000mb. The lowest ever recorded was 870mb measured in the eye of Super Typhoon Tip in the Pacific Ocean on 12th October 1979 ………….. I mentioned in my piece that in low pressure systems the wind spins counterclockwise. I could have added it’s the reverse in the southern hemisphere, due to the Coriolis effect.

PC 485 Live more? Live less?

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There is something rather dictatorial about the title of this week’s postcard, but it was prompted by one of the doctors at The Hove Practice on Church Road, Dr Ellie Deane-Bowers. We were chatting about the after-effects of major surgery, and I recounted my conversation with Professor Hugh Perry, Emeritus Professor of Experimental Neuropathology at the University of Southampton, who had worked with Celina’s father in Rio de Janeiro. We had lunch with him and his wife Jess in May 2024 (See PC 388 Lymington) and, having never met me before, he asked for my ‘potted history’; where I was born, what I had done etc.

“I was born in Bath (blah blah) ……. In 2013 I had a triple heart bypass …..”. Hugh took a step backwards and looked at me anew. It seems that most people, 85% (?), become rather risk-averse, withdrawn from full-on activities, after major surgery. I had met a few of them in the Moulsecomb Leisure Centre on the east side of Brighton, where I went for a series of rehabilitation sessions after my bypass. “Hey! Take it easy; you’re sweating” said one of my fellow participants! He clearly was in that 85% category. There was no reason from a physical point of view to take it easy; as Jonathan Hyde my heart surgeon said: ‘good for 30 years’. So, it’s purely mental, the development of habits that restrict, that close one down, that make you live less than you’re physically capable of.

I asked a fellow yogi, Ian, his take on why we stop attempting something. “Fear!” was his immediate response and he promised to expand this idea when I asked: “Fear of what?”

Rather reflected what Marianne Williamson had written (See PC 205 First Steps): “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. ….. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Marianne suggests we fear our own power, our own innate ability to do something if we wish to. Certainly, the fear of failure is a possibility. We all know the apocryphal story of Thomas Edison who tried 99 times to make a light bulb filament burn brightly, before the 100th attempt that worked. Another American, George Washington, claimed ‘Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses,’ so the failure is self-inflicted through lack of accountability rather than lack of ability.

How do you know you can’t do something unless you try it? Four years ago, I wrote a postcard titled ‘Why You Should Try Something Different …. Ceroc?’ (PC 192 from August 2020). Maybe we don’t try things, in this case Ceroc, aka Modern Jive, because we’re worried what others will think?

The late Ken Robinson’s life’s work (PC 195) was to encourage individuals to find the one element that makes them tick, makes them want to get up and grab life, to live more. Please, if you haven’t already, read his book ‘The Element’. Isn’t everyone capable of being a writer, a musician, businessperson, sportsperson, or doing any of the myriad of things humans do? Some will be more successful at something than others – so we need to find our own personal element or elements.  

Of course, someone might have been so traumatised by some experience that they carry that burden, that trauma with them every day, every week; the trauma acts as an anchor and prevents present and future action. The suggestion in Timeline Therapy is that we attach emotions of fear, sadness, anger and guilt to past events and that we wear these emotions in the present. There was a good line in some TV drama: “Whatever darkness you’re hiding, it’s written all over your face.” So, to ‘live more’ we need, through therapy, to detach these unwanted emotions from our past. Makes sense, I think; no one really wants to ‘live less’, surely?

I was talking to a clinical psychologist the other day; at some point in the conversation, I told him of the sudden death of a friend’s sister at the age of 59. Incidentally this tragedy had reminded me of Victoria, the sister of a good friend, who had died aged just 60 (See PC 22 Life is Uncertain).  It’s always interesting to hear people’s reactions, but I was shocked by his: “Illness and death stalk us always”. Maybe it’s true but it’s so morbid, would not be my immediate response to someone’s personal tragedy.

A recent Times article about lust and libido by Jean-Claude Chalmet, a psychotherapist, raised many interesting issues, but one particularly relevant for this postcard. Under a sub-title ‘….. but do look after yourself and your body’, he writes: “I notice among my clients, and particularly in men, that if they let themselves go physically, they also let go of their needs and desires. It’s often because there’s been a realisation in midlife that they haven’t lived, they’ve merely existed. They’ve had an unfulfilling career, a marriage that has become operational (sic). Now, learning to live looks arduous and disinterest becomes their armour because they think it’s too late. This bitterness and ‘beer belly’ combination kills libido in a couple.” The message is clear; stop existing, start living.

Ian again: “Is fear the biggest inhibitor or the biggest motivator? If something scares the living daylights out of you, if you’re brave enough to pursue it, it can give you the biggest reward and often the biggest opportunity to develop as a person.” There will always be uncertainty in life, whether it’s moving up to a new school, finding your feet in university, earning money and growing as a person, developing relationships, parenting, coping with the loss of loved ones, whatever, that’s a given.

And Ian reminded me that we are born with only two innate hard-wired fears designed for survival, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noise. These instinctive responses instantly trigger the fight-or-flight mechanism!

I will continue these themes in a future postcard.

Richard 3rd April 2026

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk