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PC 505 Did you see …….

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Those who decide who should be included in the day’s obituaries must have an interesting time discussing the merits of one person’s life over another. And they obviously hope that, having made their selection, the last-minute demise of someone mega well-known will not have them scrabbling for their page layout tools. As an example of their craft, a week ago yesterday The Times’s included Monty Roberts, ‘horse whisperer and friend of Queen Elizabeth II’; Eve Wilkinson, ‘message coder for Winston Churchill’; Justin Hardy, ‘film maker’; Plas Johnson, ‘saxophonist whose solo defined ‘The Pink Panther’ theme (Ed. It immediately started playing in my memory); The Rev Edward Hovsepian-Mehr, ‘Iranian pastor who led an underground church’ and Kath Pettingill, ‘one-eyed matriarch of a Melbourne crime family’.

The rules of copyright forbid me from copying and pasting Kath’s photograph here but believe me she was not blessed with a natural beauty. The Times’ obituary started:

“A diminutive, one-eyed grandmother known as Granny Evil, Kath Pettingill was the matriarch of Melbourne’s most notorious crime family. She oversaw an empire built on drugs, armed robberies and prostitution that reached its heyday in the 1980s, often protected by corrupt police officers. Pettingill bore the scars of a lifetime on the wrong side of the tracks. Her front teeth were smashed after leaping over a wall to retrieve a ball but remained untreated. Her right eye was shot out in 1978 during an argument with a prostitute over a $300 debt. That brought the benefit, she joked, of not seeing double after excess drinking. The police joined the humour, naming a surveillance exercise against her family Operation Cyclops. Several of her ten children followed in her criminal footsteps.” Etcetera! Etcetera. A fascinating story.

I really don’t think I am alone, such is the natural curiosity running through us all, that when I read something interesting, or unusual, or something that highlights my lack of knowledge, it sometimes leads me to find out more about it. And it’s so easy these days, with the internet and its trillions of data available at the stroke of a computer key.

I have read many of the fictional novels of Australian author Chris Hammer and have just finished his latest, ‘Legacy’. A previous one, ‘The Broken River’, had these lines:

“He drew deep on the reefer before breathing out. ‘The ancient Greeks worshipped a sun god, Helios, who had a son and seven daughters. When the son died, his sisters wept tears of golden sunlight that were hardened by their grief to become amber.’“

Celina and I live in an apartment in a 2010 conversion of a large 1890s house in Hove. The developers named it Amber House, after the Amber Cup which was unearthed during landscaping in 1856 to create nearby Palmeira Square. An ancient 6-metre-high burial mound was excavated and found to contain a coffin hewn from a tree-trunk. Dated from 1200 BC, it yielded many treasures including this cup, made of translucent red Baltic Amber and about the size of a regular teacup. The find suggests trade links between Britain and the Baltic States over 3200 years ago??? Wow!

I have no knowledge of even the basics of Greek Mythology, so I went online and found this, ‘Thank you, AI’, which filled some of the spaces in Chris Hammer’s story.  ‘Phaethon, son of Helios, begs his father to let him drive the golden sun chariot for a day. A hot-headed youth, he loses control of the horses, and the fiery chariot scorches the earth, nearly destroying it. To save the earth, Zeus strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt, causing him to fall into a river called Eridanus and he’s drowned. His grieving sisters, known as the Heliades, stood on the riverbank and wept for him so long that the gods turned them into Poplar trees and their hardened tears into golden Amber.’ So now I understand that the little cup was made from Greek tears.

Reading the ladies became Poplar trees reminded me of a framed print in the dining room of Glencot, a ‘prep’ school near Wookey Hole in Somerset. I don’t recognise any images that the internet offers when I search for ‘poplar trees’, so it may not have been by a famous artist, but it’s stayed with me. It looked something like this:

A possible entry into the RA’s Summer Exhibition 20027? Think it would need some work!

Talking of reading, James Marriott’s weekend essay in last Saturday’s Times was jaw-dropping. He writes: ‘Where people once used smartphones to read news articles, they now use them to spend hours scrolling through a dazzling stream of videos, many of them only a few seconds long. More than 40 per cent of young adults regularly get their news from TikTok.’ He highlighted the fact that the publishing industry is ever more reliant for its survival on a committed hard core of “super-readers”; ‘80 per cent of books are read by 20 per cent of adults.’ (Note 1) and claims, more worrying for those who care, that the decline of reading is about more than the fading of a pleasant hobby. ‘It is one of the most important trends of our time. We are moving from a literate culture based on the written word to a visual one dominated by moving images.’

My postcards have helped close an ‘open’ memory. Martin Ward-Harrison was in my intake at Sandhurst (RMAS) and we became very good friends.

Our ‘end of Officer Training’ photograph July 1967; Intake 39 Burma Company. Martin’s on his horse, with his groom holding the drinks tray. I suspect it was his horsebox too.

On commissioning our paths parted; in the days before email and mobile phones, keeping in touch required writing letters and we were both very busy. I had no inkling what had happened when I heard he had died in Oman in 1976. A childhood friend of Martin’s, Nick MacAndrews, got in touch through my postcards about my time at RMAS, asking what I knew. We did some digging and, thanks to Keith Ryde of Oman.org, found he’d been in a Landover that crashed near the Dhofar border with Yemen. Badly injured, he was airlifted back to the UK but died a few days later. On 24 October 2023 his name was added to the Roll of Honour at RMAS, suggesting he’d been seconded to the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces, to assist in their border conflict with Yemeni rebels. Feel good about this closure!

Richard 21st August 2026

Estoril, Portugal

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 I no longer get paid to work, so in theory have more time to read than others. In 2025 I read 35 books, so I suspect clearly in Marriott’s 20%.

PC 503 The Lanes and North Laine, Brighton

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My parents moved from Bath to Sussex in the mid-1950s and eventually settled in the village of Balcombe, twenty miles north of Brighton. Given the paucity of excitement in the nearest town, Haywards Heath, apart from the Perrymount Cinema which showed up-to-date films (Note 1), it was inevitable that Brighton provided more interest. There were regular trips to the Theatre Royal on New Road (Note 2) …..

…… to watch pre-London plays. Today, seventy years later, it presents comedy, musicals, cabaret and children’s entertainment. We also went to the annual Christmas ‘Ice Spectactual’ at the rink at the bottom of West Street. The steam train from Balcombe took 20 minutes … in the summer holidays a day on the beach involved the train from Balcombe then a walk down to the beaches of Hove, always less crowded that those immediately south of the railway station.

My brother and me, circa 1958

It’s the same today; day trippers heading straight down to the sea, hugger mugger on the beach with others, while a little walk West would give them more space!

I think the most interesting parts of the city, apart from the Royal Pavilion, built between 1815 and 1822, are the North Laine, at one time Brighton’s worst slum – a laine was an open plain divided into sections for farming – and The Lanes. The latter are essentially located in what was the village of Brighthelmstone, bounded by West Street, North Street, East Street and the sea on its southern edge.

We have to thank King George IV who, as the Prince of Wales, first came to Brighton in 1783 and put the town on the map, establishing its first ‘Season’. He later commissioned the Royal Pavilion and his annual visits encouraged a building spree that defines Brighton’s architectural character today. Georgian buildings such as the Old Ship Hotel (circa 1794) rub shoulders with whitewashed Regency and early Victorian townhouses.

The Lanes are a delightful collection of little streets and pedestrianised squares, often linked by twittens. A twitten is an old Sussex-dialect word for a narrow path or alleyway, which serve as short cuts. From North Street running south into The Lanes is Meeting House Lane, a twitten said to be haunted by the ghost of a nun who was walled up alive after eloping with a soldier. There’s another good example of a twitten just up from our yoga studio, which is situated in the old Rabbi’s house behind the synagogue on Middle Street.

Yoga In The Lanes’ entrance to the left of the Synagogue

Ship Street Gardens features C19th cottages and a famous fig tree and links Middle Street with Ship Street.

Whilst both The Lanes and the North Laine have many independent shops, The Lanes has a greater preponderance of chain outlets, such as Penhaligon’s, Molton Brown, Lush, Russell & Bromley, Loake, and Flying Tiger.

It is also well known for its jewellers and antique shops, fashion boutiques, cafés and restaurants, including The Ivy and its Asian sister.

English’s of Brighton, the city’s famous seafood restaurant on East Street, is located in three former fishermen’s cottages. Reviewers highlight the fresh rock oysters as a ‘must try’. The city’s Town Hall is located on Bartholomew Road and is where Celina and I got married on 20th August 2016. The building also houses the Old Police Cells museum.

You could easily while away an afternoon, drifting from a coffee house such as Café Coho, exploring Meeting House Lane, Brighton Place, Market Square, winding down its narrow lanes, ….. stopping and being surprised at, for example, The Duck House!

To access the North Laines you cross busy North Street, up New Street with the theatre opposite Pavillion Gardens and a glimpse of the Royal Pavillion, on past The Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and the Brighton Dome, once the Prince Regent’s stables and now a venue for concerts, dance shows, and plays and the headquarters of the Brighton Festival. Here you find a patchwork of small streets lined with quirky shops, drawing crowds of locals and tourists alike.

When I wanted someone to fashion two little loops of leather, I went to Clever with Leather in a basement workshop on Tidy Street.

Writing of leather, if you are fastidious about not using animal products, you could buy some shoes or boots from The Vegetarian Shoe shop on Gardner Street.

After wearing contact lenses for decades, the removal of my cataracts meant I could indulge in some funky reading glasses. Bromptons Opticians, further up on Gardner Street, has just such frames, but I needed a second mortgage to buy these:

Having a sweet tooth, I get drawn to Caramella on Kensington Gardens where you can buy old-fashioned confectionary. Fancy a humbug or Sherbert Lemons or do you prefer liquorice; the latter in many shapes and lengths and, if you ask nicely, you can pick and choose your favourite ‘Liquorice All Sorts’ – for me the little pink and blue buttons!

On Trafalgar Street you can find just the right hat for you, assisted by knowledgeable staff who know about face shapes, and can advise accordingly.

Every city suffers from Grafitti and Brighton is no different, but this mural on Bond Street is surely in a class of its own.

Brighton has just celebrated Pride and I am reminded yet again how inclusive this city is, quite extraordinary! There is a tangible acceptance of people being who they want to be, and no one bats an eyelid, apart from visitors unused to such genuine displays of confidence. I saw these women walking up Gardner Street and thought ‘why not?’

The Lanes and North Laines are so worth a visit!

Richard 7th August 2026

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS If you come to Brighton don’t forget to say hello to the European Herring Gull, otherwise known as: “Oi!” as it swoops down on your fish ‘n chips.

PPS Brighton is 9,219kms (5,729 miles) from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Note 1 Opened in 1936, it had a little dance hall and a café, as well as the auditorium for screening films. You could smoke in the rear rows! It closed in 1972 and the building demolished in 1984.

Note 2 It had opened in 1807.

PC 497 Discussing Copyright with Duncan

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“You told me of your sister’s copyright infringement fine whilst at university, Duncan ….. (see PC 496) ….”

“Yes! So, what’s your sorry story?

“A sorry story indeed! I don’t think I am not alone in downloading images from the internet to share with chums, something you see interesting, beautiful, explanatory? ‘To share with chums’ ….. so not public! And you probably don’t worry about the original image’s ‘copyright’? Although if you do it to illustrate, for instance, a non-commercial newsletter, for a limited but public readership, you enter a minefield.”

“When I started The Hope Café I did search for suitable images for the promotional material …. and indeed for the posters for the walls, although I always imagined the original copyright was covered. Thankfully I didn’t need anything for your gifted triptych!”

A present to The Hope Café

“My first postcards were emailed to a very small group. Then I created my www.postcardscribbles.co.uk public site and started embedding the odd photograph to make them more interesting. Finding the right photograph was fun, often through Google. Some of my postcards have covered the Post Office scandal; meeting Sami, the ex-PO submanager made bankrupt by the fines imposed on him, here in The Hope Café gave a personal dimension to the story and in one PC I used a photo of Sir Alan Bates and in another one of Betty Brown OBE; both photographs taken off the internet.

Then, out of the blue, I receive this from one of the media giants: “To whom it may concern, We are contacting you regarding the use of our imagery on your website postcardscribbles.co.uk. We don’t have any record of our content being licensed for this use. …….. If you don’t have a licence, your use of our images would constitute an infringement of our copyright … note that removal alone does not resolve the matter.”

“Wow! I bet you gulped hard at that – and started sweating?

“Did I ever! The bottom line was ……  ‘We, Mega Media company, own the copyright and you should pay over £1400 to avoid an immediate fine of £5000’ ….. something like that! I paid ….. and had a sleepless night …. then I got another fine ….. and I began thinking it was a scam! I contacted my bank’s fraud hotline and explained. They gave me the bonafide Mega Media Customer Services email and telephone number and soon I am having an email exchange with their ‘Copyright Enforcement Specialist’ Adam; sounded very Big Brother!”

“Didn’t you know any lawyer who could give you advice?”

“It’s a very specialist area and not one three friends who are lawyers are familiar with. But another friend, bless her, asked Chat GPT, who she calls ‘Gerald’ (!) …… I will summarise what it wrote:

‘This is a common trap for non-commercial newsletters. I’m not a lawyer, (!!) so treat this as general info. For years, rights holders rarely chased individuals for non-commercial use. That changed around 2015-2018 when automated systems made it cheap to send thousands of letters. Software generates a letter claiming, “unauthorised use” and demanding a “settlement fee” that’s much higher than a normal license. They rely on fear.’

“Well, it’s right there! Exactly how you acted, out of fear! The huge advances in AI make it a doddle to scan billions of pages worldwide in seconds. What else?”

“Gerald went on:

‘The bottom line was: ‘If he copied/pasted an image from Google and used it without a license, that’s infringement under the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright infringement is “strict liability” – intent and profit don’t matter. If it went to court, a judge would look at what a license would have cost. For a non-commercial newsletter to 450 people, a single image license is typically £20-£150, not thousands.

“Did Gerald suggest what you should do?”

“One of the positives about AI is that it often does. In my case Gerald said:

Step 1: Stop doing it and don’t ignore the email.
Step 2: Check who’s demanding money. (Scams exist too)
Step 3: Don’t pay the “penalty” amount as-is – the first demand is usually inflated.
Step 4: Respond with a “mitigation” letter. This often gets it settled for £100-£300 per image.

If I needed photographs for a future postcard, I should look at public domain images in Wikimedia Commons, or on Royalty-free sites like Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, which are all free for editorial use.”

I squirmed and wrote an obsequious email, which went something like:

‘Since 2014 I have written a weekly electronic postcard and post them on WordPress. I have a hundred or so regular readers (actually a few hundred!!) and topics have covered my own career, sailing, travel, observations about life and current affairs. As a member of the older generation, it’s good to keep my brain active ….. I make no money from these literary efforts. Suddenly I am charged over £1400 for using two photographs. Not sure where this will come from but there was a threat of an immediate £5000 fine so paid up. Can I appeal? Is it fair? On what basis are the charges made? Advice please?”

In amongst the reply I was asked for a printout of my ‘Profit & Loss’ account!! I got a reduction and removed my old postcards.”

“What if someone wants to read one from your back catalogue of almost 500, as often you refer to an old one in a new postcard?”

“They would need to ask me by email. When all’s said and done, Duncan, the individuals who produced the photograph, the artwork, in the first place need to earn a crust.”

“But for you, Richard, David & Goliath or Sledgehammers & Nuts come to mind!!”

Richard 26th June 2026

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS On Tuesday it was announced that Getty Images, one of the world’s largest photography agencies, has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with OpenAI, months after it lost a high-profile copyright infringement claim against another artificial intelligence developer. The deal will mean images from its library will appear within ChatGPT’s search display, bringing more visual features into the chatbot.