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
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.
postcards 