travel

PC 432 Hope as Always (Continued)

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There’s never enough time to catch up with everyone in the Hope Café so I make an effort to see Sami and Mo particularly. Anyone else is a bonus! Sami and his partner Lisa get a coffee, decline some pancakes that Libby is trying to get rid of, and join me at one of the bigger tables.

“You’re looking well, Richard! Must be all that ‘freezing-your-b*****ks-off’ in that CryoBright place; that and the hot yoga you’re addicted to!”

“Hello you two! Good to see you both and yes, Sami, not a crime to be addicted to something, surely! And I have lengthened my time in the cold chamber to the maximum they recommend, 5 minutes. Got carried away last Wednesday, singing along with the music in my headphones. Came out and found I had an audience! Sounds travel!!”

“You’ve sailed thousands of miles, Richard, so you’d have been shocked when those two ships collided in the North Sea. (Ed. On 10th March) How is it possible these days?”

“Ah! Sami, you, like all the news releases, talk of how the two ships ‘collided’ or that they ‘crashed into each other’, inferring both were to blame. I really don’t think it could be the fault of the oil tanker MV Stena Immaculate, sadly no longer immaculate, peacefully at anchor, displaying all the appropriate signage and one of eight other large tankers and container ships at anchor off the Humber Estuary. At anchor you hoist a large black ball in the fore part of the ship; at night you additionally need an all-round white light.”

The MV Stena Immaculate with a large hole on her port side

“Do you need to have a human being on ‘anchor watch’? I read that the Portuguese-registered container ship, MV Solong (Note 1), was steaming south off the East Yorkshire coast at its full speed of 16kts when it rammed the MV Stena Immaculate. The impact caused the Stena Immaculate to be displaced some 200 metres. The Solong’s gross tonnage was 7852 and momentum, if I remember my mathematics, is mass multiplied by speed. What’s that expression? ‘What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?’

“It’s brought to mind that time in Cyprus, described in PC 231 ‘Ropes, Warps and Sheets’ from May 2021, when I was part of the crew sailing from Akrotiri to Dhekelia, and we anchored off the beach. The skipper didn’t leave anyone on board as he judged it safe. But there was a local wind that blew in the late morning. Someone alerted the skipper as he was having his eggs & bacon …. read the postcard.

A still from some Super 8 cinefilm of Highlight on the beach

In the same postcard I wrote about skippering St Barbara IV, a Nicholson 43, from Liverpool to Oban on the west coast of Scotland, years later. A day or so after visiting the Isle of Man, we anchored off the little village of Lamlash on the eastern side of the Isle of Arran. It wasn’t exactly sheltered from the northeast and when the wind shifted in the middle of the night, the chap on watch woke me, so I could assess the situation; it was 0310. We started the engine, raised the anchor and motored across to shelter in the lee of Holy Isle.

To those of us who sail, Sami, it’s unbelievable that this could happen, given radar and watch-keeper systems. Clearly a human error, ultimately by the captain of the Solong, who has now been charged with Gross Negligence Manslaughter, as one crewman sadly died. I read that the Solong had travelled through this area of the North Sea three times in the last month. However, the description of the collision reminded me of one of those regular reasons people say when they have a car accident and fill out the claim form: “The lamppost just jumped into the road.” (See PS)

“On to more local issues, I am glad I accepted the compensation offered by the Post Office last year, as some of my colleagues are still waiting. Beggars’ belief how bureaucrats can be so obstructionist! (See PC 420 Contentious Issues in the UK for 2025)”

“You’ve come a long way in 4 years, Sami, and it’s been a delight to see you and Lisa happy and excited about life. You know my daughter bought her late maternal grandmother’s wreck of a house and has spent the last 7 months working on it? Well, it’s now habitable enough and they move in tomorrow; still a great deal of work to do but the financial pot is empty and needs to be refilled.”

“You’re going to tell me a story of some blunder or other?

“I am, Sami, as it reinforces the wonderful adage if you’re a DIY enthusiast, ‘measure twice, cut once.’ The builder who’s been responsible for most of the work is a lovely chap and a carpenter by trade, so he of all people should follow the traditional advice. I was at the house a couple of weeks ago and thought that a new balustrade looked too low for safety. I mentioned it to my son-in-law Sam, took a photograph and reinforced my thought by WhatsApp when I got home.

Sam mentioned it to the builder who protested that it was absolutely fine. Then a day later he quietly admitted he’d measure the height from one floor level and not the other, a difference of 10cms. He’s going to have to remake it from scratch!”

“That extra 10cms could make the difference between a boisterous boy going over the top or not! Listen, we know you’re off to Rio but when you come back, can we find a date for you to come and have some supper with us? After Easter maybe?”

“That will be delightful (See PCs 329 & 330 ‘Supper with Sami’ April 2023 when they came to us). Why don’t you send us some options and we can pencil something in. And now I need to get going ….. lovely to see you both …..”

This conversation was over a week ago as we are now in Barra da Tijuca, a western suburb of Rio de Janeiro!!

View from our AirBnB apartment

Richard 28th March 2025

Rio de Janeiro

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS The still smouldering MV Solong has been towed to the Scottish port of Aberdeen, arriving yesterday.

Note 1There’s a joke here somewhere: ‘so long, farewell …..’ ???? (The Sound of Music?)

PC 431 Hope as Always

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Haven’t had a chance to see Mo in the last few weeks so, by text, we agreed to meet for a coffee in The Hope Café on Monday afternoon, as next week we fly to Rio de Janeiro. I’d arrived early and managed to chat to Libby for a couple of minutes. She’s recovering from her embarrassment of being the victim of a Romance Scam (See PC 427 Hope Conversations February 2025) and tells me talking about it really helped. (Note 1) She also added that the café still has a special offer of pancakes, a sort-of left over from Shrove Tuesday, as they were a big hit that day.

The tradition of having pancakes on the day before Lent in the Christian calendar is embedded in my DNA, as is the celebration of Carnival if you are like my wife, Celina, Brazilian. It seems the whole country stops for days to celebrate, and the parade of the Samba Schools is something to experience.

The parade on part of the 700m Sambodromo

We went to the Sambodromo to witness Rio de Janeiro’s carnival in February 2014; read PC 07 ‘Carnival’ to feel the beat!

The word carnival comes from the Latin for ‘farewell to meat’, ‘carne vale’. European countries celebrate carnival without the beat of Samba and the largest one in Northern Europe is in the Danish city of Aalborg on Jutland. The Nice carnival claims to be the oldest in the world, with its roots dating back to 1294 and it’s a well-celebrated event in many Germanic cities. Don’t forget that the words Mardi Gras, celebrated particularly in New Orleans in the United States, means Fat Tuesday in French! (Note 2)

I like the idea that the need to clear out all the eggs, before one’s 40 days and 40 nights of restricted eating, brought a plate stacked with pancakes, over which lemon juice would be sprinkled to give them a sharpness and granulated sugar sieved or Maple syrup dribbled to give them sweetness, to the dining table. I was getting stuck into such a pile when Mo arrived. Mumbling a sort-of ‘hello’, I finished my mouthful and said hello properly. Mo is already in catch-up mode:

“I wanted to get the train back to north London the weekend before last and I came up against our antiquated rail system.”

“Not sure I understand. Antiquated in what way?”

“We are lucky to have a reasonable network of railway lines and when the trains run on time it’s a very easy way to travel from A to B. But I find it amazing that, in 2025, our train services are affected by archaic employment contracts for the train drivers. Did you know that none of their contracts stipulates Sunday working – it’s voluntary and the operating companies rely on the drivers agreeing to ‘rest-day working arrangements’, for which they get paid some £600 a shift. So I had to do part of my journey on a frigging bus!”

“Ah! Yes! I think this is a clear case of the government shooting itself in the foot.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re right that the Train Operating Companies have always relied on drivers opting for overtime to cover the Sunday need. In comes the new government, more sympathetic to the ‘working man’, whatever that means (Note 3), and fed up with two years of industrial action on the railways, awards them the asked-for pay rise, without any changes to working practices. So come Christmas last year, drivers who would have traditionally needed the overtime but now flush with cash, just said: ‘No thanks I’m off to Lanzarote with the Mrs’.”

“This is ridiculous. It’s 2025 and we need both a modern transport system and modern working conditions. Reminds me that it wasn’t long ago that the German railway system got rid of a regulation that required every train to have a red flag to be waved in front of the engine! By the way, I read your PC about going into the cold chamber at CryoBright (PC 429 Beyond the Glass). Not something I want to try but I understand its potential benefits.”

“The owner of Cryobright, Rob, commented: “I’ve never really thought about our windows, but I quite like the idea they create a bit of intrigue. A better marketeer would probably blah blah blah about lost ‘awareness opportunity’ etc but we have had a lot of people saying we are a hidden gem – which is nice.”

“Not sure whether you are a cook Richard so ….”

“Oh! I love cooking although don’t do as much as I used to …”

“I found this recipe for a lemon cake which was so weird I had to try it!”

“What was weird about it?”

“Well, first up it uses mayonnaise …..”

“Excuse me! Sorry! Mayo in a cake?”

“Well, as the writers of ‘Bake It Easy’, Tom Oxford and Oliver Coysh, say, mayonnaise is made from emulsified fat and eggs, and that’s half the ingredients of a cake!”

“What was it like?”

“Lovely …. and who doesn’t like lemon cake! Oh! I must tell you, Richard, of a conversation I had the other day after my weekly Pilates class. I was talking to a new student, who said that she’d come back after having her second child, now six months old. And I asked her if she had a nanny. ‘No! Man.’ I obviously looked expectant, wanting a little more information, so she said ‘partner’. Thinking about it later, I thought of these labels we use nowadays.”

At that moment Sami and Lisa came into the Hope Café and I wanted to talk to them, so said goodbye to Mo and …..

(To be continued)

Richard 21st March 2025

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 I cannot emphasise enough how beneficial it can be to talk, talk about your problems, share your thoughts, listen to your own voice.

Note 2 Love ‘Fat Tuesday’! In England the Notting Hill Carnival, first held in London in 1966, takes place in August, and is a celebration of all things Caribbean.

Note 3 The ‘working man’ is, I understand, the product of the ‘working class’ ……. but we try not to mention ‘class’ anymore ….. as most individuals who work could claim to be working. Falling over themselves to be ‘correct’, our new Labour Government suggests that the ‘working man’ is someone who will rely on the State Pension and no other income when they retire, stop working.

PC 429 Behind the Glass

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I don’t know about you, but I am often intrigued to know what goes on behind shop fronts that have frosted windows. They are the complete opposite of those using the shop window to entice potential customers, displaying something to make you want to go inside, maybe a poster showing a sale percentage reduction. Sometimes restaurants have an opaque window to give their customers some privacy and it’s the same for The Hove Practice, a private GPs’ surgery, which recently moved onto Church Road. Along the street is a massage clinic, with the obligatory hazy windows! We are lucky enough to have Kay Delphine, a very experienced masseuse, who comes to our apartment, otherwise we might have used one of these places. Some had a seedy reputation, offering more than a simple massage, but I sense those days have long gone.

Opposite etch (note 1), a restaurant on the corner of Church Road and Hove Street run by Steven Edwards, a winner of MasterChef The Professionals, is one such place. A non-descript opaque window with its shop signage, ‘CryoBright’, offering no real clue to what goes on inside.

A voucher at Christmas gave us a couple of ‘experiences’ at CryoBright and in late January we pushed open the door. CryoBright provides ‘convenient, affordable access to the most advanced wellness and recovery techniques.’ These include an infrared sauna, red light therapy, fat freezing, leg compression therapy, physiotherapy, whole body cryotherapy and massage, mainly aimed at those recovering from some form of sports injury, which I am not! I was interested in the leg compression trousers, to improve blood circulation to my feet, and in the cold chamber – out of curiosity!

The ‘Compression’ trousers slide over your legs then go through a 20-second sequence of inflate/deflate, inflate/deflate for 20 minutes. It seems very gentle, too gentle almost and so I decide to concentrate on the cold chamber.

The idea is that extreme cold acts as a stimulus to your nervous system, particularly to the hypothalamus, responsible for reacting to dangerous situations; the ‘fight or flight’ trigger. It initiates several physiological reactions in the body, the main one being to restrict blood flow to the periphery, concentrating it around one’s vital organs.  

I said I am curious. Most of my experience of ‘cold’ is from winter weather, either skiing or on military exercises many years ago, when the wind chill can drop temperatures alarmingly. I am a pussy when it comes to swimming in a cold sea, such as in Estoril in Portugal, but the benefits of cold-water immersion are becoming more mainstream. Here in Hove many people swim in the sea all the year around, part of their daily routine, and swear by the invigorating afterglow. (Note 2) I guess we’ve all heard of Dutchman Wim Hof, aka the Iceman. In addition to plunging himself, and other paying customers, into freezing cold water, he markets a particular technique of breathing. Proper breathing is an essential part of practising yoga; in the hot yoga series you only breathe through your nose for the first hour.

My Wim Hof T Shirt

Hof’s technique involves inhaling through your nose or mouth, filling both belly and chest, and exhaling through your mouth. Each breath should be short and powerful; do 30 to 40 then stop. We all take our lungs for granted, never bothering to exercise them – it’s estimated we only use some 60% of our lung capacity. And I certainly hadn’t heard of COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) until those first COVID months. In summary, I breathe well but wouldn’t want to plunge myself into a bath full of ice. (Note 3)

But when we returned from Portugal in September last year, a new cold-water shower, installed in the outer courtyard as part of the yoga studio’s new sauna offering, offered an opportunity to cool down quickly. Now, at the end of my 90 minutes 40°C hot yoga class, I go straight out and have a cold shower. Strangely, I have begun to look forward to it; odd huh! It’s wonderful!

At CryoBright, Rob explains that the cold chamber is designed to give your body a thermal shock so, wearing shorts, a facemask, gloves, socks and slippers and with a set of headphones clamped around my ears, I open the door and enter. Oh! I should have said, it’s minus 85C. I have opted for 4 minutes but after 5 seconds my brain is already saying ‘fly!’. Fortunately, I decide to stay, moving around, glancing at the large clock on an iPad outside that’s counting down the four minutes, listening to music. I wonder how my body is reacting, why my nipples are feeling particularly cold, and resist the temptation to focus on the time. Just enjoy the experience. Outside, I put my clothes back on; my back is tingling in a delicious way and I feel fantastic. We sign up for a package of sessions; this Monday was my eighth and now I look forward to freezing my b******* off!

Our curiosity has encouraged chums to try it. Spread the word!

Richard 7th March 2025

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS Celina also enjoys the cold chamber!

Note 1 Note the small ‘e’. Generally the first word of a sentence uses a capitalised first letter. There’s a distinction between ‘Etch’ and ‘etch’, although it’s personal! As a verb, to etch means to eat away the surface of something; I can only guess this is the tenuous connection for the title of the restaurant.

Note 2 In the summer of 1966, as an Officer Cadet at Sandhurst, I was attached to a Germany-based Artillery Battery for its two weeks Adventure Training near Oberammergau. I went with Staff Sergeant Curtis to recce a lake for some canoeing. The water looked inviting; he suggested I jump in. It was absolutely freezing, almost heart-stopping (!) and I got out as quickly as I had got in! Curtis laughed.

Note 3 The outdoor swimming pool water at Dauntsey’s School was fed directly from a cold spring. Maybe our lap times were quick as we wanted to get out as soon as possible.

PC 428 More of Life’s Observations

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In PC 424 ‘We are Nothing Without Hope’ (31 Jan 2025) I scribbled about the lasting memories some have of the Holocaust, such as Eddie Jaku who wrote ‘The Happiest Man on Earth’. Those who survived have been encouraged to record their experiences of their time in the Nazi Concentration Camps, such as Buchenwald, Belsen Bergen Hohne and Auschwitz. Doing so has awakened long-buried memories of horror, so there has been a great reluctance; but without their courage, these stories will be lost and they cannot be.

I recently finished ‘Lily’s Promise’ (Note 1), the autobiographical account of Hungarian Jew Lily Ebert’s time in Auschwitz-Birkenau from July 1944. In October 1944 she was moved to the Altenburg slave labour camp that provided the workforce for the HASAG munitions factory. In the first week of April the factory was closed and more than 2000 human skeletons of women and children were marched off – to somewhere. Three days later, on 12th April 1945, they realised their guards had gone. An American Army unit found them in a village called Pfaffroda, in Saxony, 5kms from the Czech border. The second half of Lily’s book is equally fascinating, hugely engaging, and I encourage you to read it.

Lily receiving her MBE

You know when you’re reading a book there’s sometimes a temptation to turn a corner of the page so you can reread a piece again? The rounding up of Hungarian Jews began at the end of June 1944. By 5th July, Lily and her two sisters find themselves herded like cattle onto a train for a journey of four days; with no food, no water, nowhere to defecate. It’s possible that cattle have more space. The train took them to Auschwitz. I had to read the following paragraph twice, so awestruck and horrified by its words:

“And now I must pause and think. Words can barely describe what happened next, but words are all I have. Even while I was living through this time, I could not comprehend it, so how could I convey the experience to someone who was not there? I try to go back in my head, to understand how our hearts kept beating, how our lungs kept breathing, how we did this, how we did that, the mechanics of our movements, how could this have possibly happened. I know it did, because I can’t forget it. I realise that at this point we simply went numb. I felt yet could not feel. I thought yet could not think. In the face of such brutality, nothing about me worked as it should. The idea that one human being could do this to another overwhelms me.”

Lily Ebert died on 9th October last year aged 100; her legacy, her promise, will hopefully be remembered for decades.

Needing to come back to today, to ‘now’, I head to the Hope Café and find Sami.

“Oh! Hi Richard” he said, looking up from his iPad. “Just trying to understand the debacle about the i360 (Note 2), how the council have written off the attraction’s debt of £53m and sold it to Nightcap for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be between half and one-and-a-half million pounds. What do you think?”

“God! I had a very jaundiced view of the whole thing from its conception. Firstly 50% of the view from the top is the sea; no islands, no estuary mudflats, just the English Channel, so I thought it should have been called the i180! If you’ve been up The Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth ……”

The Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth

“Lisa and I have ……”

“….. you’ll remember there is something to see at every point of the compass. South and the whole of the Isle of Wight stretches in front of you, vertically down to HMS Victory and the dockyards, East towards Hayling Island and Chichester. Ferries, cargo ships, liners and yachts criss-cross The Solent.

The view across Gosport Marina to the Isle of Wight

Here in Brighton the offshore wind farm is the only thing that breaks the monotony of the view across The Channel.

The view east over the pier and marina towards the Seven Sisters

Secondly The Green Party was running the council when it was conceived, but the glass came from Italy and the metal tubes from The Netherlands; hardly ‘supporting the local economy’ …… and actually a sad reflection on the UK’s manufacturing capabilities.

The view west. We live just inland from the top of the green strip (Hove Lawns)

Thirdly, everyone wants to take photographs when they get to the top, so the glass should have been non-reflective. Didn’t anyone realise this was a major requirement? Too expensive? Then don’t build it!

Reflections of legs etc spoil the photograph

And lastly, it was never going to make enough money to pay off its debt; the council borrowed, inter alia, £36 million from the Government Public Works Loan Board. Currently it stands at £53 million!”

“It’s been bought by Nightcap, a company founded by Sarah Willingham-Toxvaerd in 2020, that runs some 46 hospitality sites across the UK. They take over the 115-year lease of the site. Do you know how many people have actually been up it Richard?”

“Well, Celina and I have, and my son-in-law Sam has climbed right to the top, but the wildly optimistic prediction was 739,000 per year. The reality is that the total number of visitors from when it opened in August 2016 and January 2023 was only 1,879,000; that’s only 268,000 per year, with some allowance for the pandemic lockdown. That tells you why it went into administration.”

“So often common sense is drowned out, this time by back-of-the-fag-packet predictions; the debt’s been written off to facilitate the sale and now the council take that on! Great!”

Richard 28th February 2025

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 In the depths of Auschwitz, Lily made a promise to herself that, if she survived, she would dedicate the rest of her life to ensuring the world knew what happened during The Holocaust.

Note 2 The so-called i360 is a 162m tower erected on Brighton’s seafront in 2016. It’s opposite the skeletal remains of the City’s West Pier, which burnt down in suspicious circumstances in 2003. A 200-person capacity observation capsule rises to 138m so visitors can take in the view.

PC 426 It’s a Fine Line ….

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I was going to scribble how it’s often a fine line between success and failure, between life and death …… but I thought I would consult my Oxford Illustrated Dictionary and see what it says about ‘line’. Wow! Over a column of the three-columns-to-a-page layout devoted to the word ‘line’.

Most would immediately understand it is a noun and that it joins two points. We have telegraph and power lines; lines marking the boundaries of, for instance, a tennis court; life lines on the palm of your hand; lines that connect points having common property, like an isobar, or the Equator or lines of longitude or latitude; lines to be learned by actors, as opposed to reading between the lines to discover a meaning not obvious or expressed; a line of poetry remembered years later; somewhere to hang your washing, the clothes line; words to be written out as a school punishment; naval ships in formation are often line astern or line abreast;

tram lines in cities or railway lines criss-crossing the country; in Rugby Union forwards form a line to receive the ball from the touchline, a ‘line out’. As a verb, troops could line the streets for ceremonial occasions; you could line a drawer with paper or you could line your stomach, anticipating drinking too much alcohol!

My own fine line, my brush with death in 1991, remains very clear today. As a passenger (in car A in diagram) being driven into Canberra, Australia during the rush hour, traffic was heavy in both directions. Suddenly we were aware of a car (car B) overtaking the oncoming traffic, coming at us head-on. There was nowhere to go. My friend decided to swing right, although instinctively left would have been the better option!

The oncoming car swung to their right; a collision seemed inevitable. The only touch was the paintwork on the passenger-side wing mirror; a very fine line indeed.

Writing about lines, fine or not, remined me of a question I often asked my clients in their first coaching session. I would draw nine dots on a piece of paper, thus:

then ask them to join them up, using four straight lines, without taking their pencil off the paper. We habitually see things that aren’t necessarily there, because it gives us a comfortable feel, recognition of the familiar. I recall that about 25% of my clients were successful. Trump is thinking ‘outside of the box’ with his ideas about Gaza – makes me wonder whether he would be in the 25% or not?

Last weekend in Europe we had the second round of the Six Nations (Note 1) Rugby Union Competition. England were playing France; it was a very good game to watch and the lead changed hands throughout, although a last minute try by England meant we won 26 points to 25 …. a fine line. (Note 2)

Words which mean the same are collectively called synonyms, like ask, question or inquire, or beautiful, gorgeous and dazzling. You can also have a phrasal synonym, like ‘fine line’ and ‘hair’s breadth’. Typically a hair strand is between 0.03mm and 0.08mm in diameter; one nominal value often chosen is 75µm. Such measures can be found in many cultures; for instance in the Burmese system of Long Measure a tshan khyee, the smallest unit is literally a ‘hair’s breadth’.

A straight line between two points can be at any angle, but geometrically graphs always have at least two axes, one horizontal and one vertical. My pedantic nature is offended if something isn’t level, horizontal or vertical. Sometimes it’s a fine line, even half a degree or so. When we moved into our apartment in Amber House after its conversion in 2012, a couple of light switches were not straight; given the availability of spirit levels, it was a good example of poor workmanship.  

When sailing, if the wind is coming from the direction you want to go in, you have to ‘beat’, with the sails as flat as possible. It’s a very fine line to steer the yacht at its optimum; too much into the wind and sails start being back-winded; too far off the wind and the yacht heels so much, reducing the efficiency of the sail area. When you get it right, it’s as if the yacht ‘lifts its skirt and flies’; yachts are always female by tradition so this expression should be safe in this sensitive world.

For James Howells it’s still a fine line between success and abject misery! In Wales in 2013 he had a bitcoin wallet worth £4 million; its password was stored on his hard drive. His girlfriend, possibly ex by now (?), threw out the hard drive with some rubbish, presumably without knowing what it was. Somewhere under a mountain of household waste in some council refuse tip is a hard drive which, if retrieved, could unlock, at current bitcoin value, about a billion pounds sterling. He’s even offered the council millions if he’s allowed to successfully search for it, so far without success. 

The polarisation of everything, including politics, views about this and that, personal opinions, is making society more fractious, the line between acceptable and unacceptable extremely thin, like living on a knife-edge. With the increase in false news stories and conspiracy theories, it’s surely time for us all to apply good old fashioned common sense and move towards the centre.  

David Lammy the UK Government’s Foreign Secretary: “There’s a fine line, as you know, between free speech and hate speech.” Maybe I could add that it’s also a fine line between love and hate, other extremes. So, let’s concentrate on ‘Love’, particularly on this romantic day?

Richard St Valantine’s Day 2025

Hove

www.postcardscribles.co.uk

PS Last Summer, a tree near my brother-in-law’s apartment in Estoril Portugal looked as though it could do with about one third taken off it. Someone asked whether that should be from the top or the bottom. (Just think about that?)

Note 1 The six nations comprise England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy and Ireland

Note 2 The previous weekend Ireland had beaten England 27-22.

PC 424 We are Nothing Without Hope

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There was a very good reason that Duncan named his café here in Hove ‘The Hope Café’, as on that single word hang our todays and our tomorrows. Without hope, in whatever form, we are nothing. Last Monday was International Holocaust Memorial Day, this year’s made even more poignant as it is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Back in February 2022 I wrote about the atrocities sections of our global society have inflicted, one against another, in PC 268 Least We Forget. Whilst acknowledging that unspeakable horrors committed, man on man, have not been exclusively the preserve of the Nazis, the latter managed to create an industrial killing machine within their concentration camps. Just remember these words: ‘In Auschwitz it’s estimated that a million Jews were killed’; 1,000,000 individuals expecting, as we do today, to have a reasonable life expectancy, simply snuffed out because of their race. The testimonies of survivors at Monday’s Ceremony of Remembrance at Auschwitz shared a common theme, that current and future generations must heed the alarm bells already ringing from rampant antisemitism on display in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Last December I read ‘The Happiest Man on Earth’, the autobiographical account by Eddie Jaku (Note 1) of his life, particularly the years he spent in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. For those who are uncertain whether these camps existed, this story lays it out in all its horror and degradation. You may have already read what King Charles wrote on Monday in the Auschwitz Visitors’ Book: “Remembering what took place here, and those who were so cruelly murdered, is a duty, a sacred duty that must be protected. Being here today, hearing the stories of those who experienced its horrors, seeing the shoes of children whose lives were taken when they’d just begun, and walking the paths upon which such cruelty was inflicted is something I will never forget.”

Tova Friedman, now 86 but aged 6 when Auschwitz was liberated, should have a final word. “I stood and watched helplessly as little girls were marched away to the gas chamber. ….. I thought it was normal that if you were a Jewish child, you had to die.”

Let us hope.

I was hoping to have a chat with Lisa, Sami’s partner, when I went to The Hope Café on Wednesday, as I hadn’t seen her this year. Sure enough she’s at a table, tapping her laptop keyboard as if her life depended on it. Incidentally I hope that schools are teaching children to type properly and not just using two fingers. Unlike mine, their future is digital. Lisa’s happy to be interrupted.

“Hi! Richard. I enjoyed your last postcard …. what was its title ….  ‘There Are Standards, Carruthers.’  Excellent! I bet it garnered a lot of comments?”

“It certainly did! Funny how we find something so simple as manners and common courtesies an interesting topic. There were a lot of new readers who ‘liked’ it, so I am pleased. How are you and Sami?”

“We’re very good, thanks. With the weather so vile we’ve probably watched more television that we usually do and really enjoyed a new drama called Patience, set in the City of York. The character of the title, Patience, played by Ella Maisy Purvis, has autism, as has Ella. I read “In an overcrowded crime drama market it is the slowly developing connection between Bea (Ed. Bea Metcalf is a detective working for Yorkshire Police) and Patience that is the Bechdel test-passing USP of this show.”

“Er! What’s the Bechdel test?”

“Glad you asked. I was aware of it but it’s become very popular of late, so I looked it up. Essentially it asks whether a work featuring at least two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man.”

“Can you imagine? But seriously, that is interesting. And I assume Patience is neurodiverse….”

“Absolutely! Just like Bill Gates and see where that got him.”

“Celina and I occasionally watch dramas on Channel Four which are sponsored by a user car dealership called Arnold Clark; the advertisements always feature a car … surprising huh! One of the latest shows a chap taking an electrical charging cable, walking to the charging point on the rear of his electric car, and plugging it in. Then he seems to stand there, holding the cable handle, looking up …… at an imaginary petrol station pump display ….. as he had always done!

“Ah! Habits die hard.”

“You may remember in PC 422 ‘Back in The Hope Café’, right at the end, I admitted to Mo that I had asked someone who was due to have an acupuncture session whether it was online or were they going to the practice. Since then, the acupuncturist has confirmed he charges 25% more for online appointments!

Then I had an amusing exchange with our masseuse, Kay, who had a tree in her garden that needed trimming. She asked by text whether she could borrow a saw. She’d dictated her text and hadn’t checked it before pressing ‘send’. It came out as ‘I would love to borrow your soul if that’s possible.’ A day later she realised: ‘Just realised I’ve asked to borrow your soul. I’ll let you keep it and just stick with the saw. Anyway, didn’t you sell your soul a long time ago?’ My response was short: ‘Too long ago to remember; too short a time to forget.’”

“Brilliant! By the way, I noticed Libby’s looking very subdued and quietly asked Josh if he knew why.  Apparently, she’s admitted to him that she’d been the victim in a Romance Scam, has lost a lot of money and is feeling very embarrassed.”

“I am not surprised! I’ll have a chat with her sometime, not now, and see if she can put it behind her.

Richard 31st January 2025

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS For clarity, I am not Jewish, simply a human being.

Note 1 Eddie Jaku OAM (Order of Australia Medal) was born Abraham Jakubowicz in 1920. He died in Sydney in October 2021.

PC 422 Back in The Hope Café

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After a couple of postcards that, on reflection, were quite serious in content, I needed to relax a little, so headed to The Hope Café for some R&R (Note 1). With a pastry and double espresso in hand, I found a corner table and sat … and relaxed … and observed. Such a great pastime, watching other people living, doing, engaging, focused; fortunately, most people who are here in The Hope Café come to meet others or just get some relaxation, some space away from their hectic life outside. Well, most; apart from our budding novelist Robert, who is tapping away on his laptop at the window counter, lost in his own world of fictional stories and subplots and characterisation. He gets the best of both worlds, working with headphones clamped over his ears listening to a podcast or music, whilst absorbing the café’s ambience and warmth by a process of osmosis!

 I guess we’ve all noticed a very modern trend; where acquaintances get around a restaurant table, order some food and drinks and then get their mobiles out and catch up with their social media lives and have no conversations IRL (in real life).  It doesn’t happen here in The Hope.

I was struggling with one of The Times’ hard Killer Sudokus, which I do on a daily basis as it keeps the grey matter well oiled, when I had a tap on my shoulder. I looked up to see Mo. Pleased, I motioned to her to sit down.

“Listen, Richard; I bet you had a lot of comments about your last scribbles about the Cancel Culture. (PC 421 Not the Way to Go January 2025). I thought you did a great job, highlighting this very real issue. It’s awful and a very worrying state of affairs, especially for those with low self-esteem. The new ‘being sent to Coventry’, perhaps; used to mean deliberately ostracising them, by not talking to them and acting as though they no longer exist. Sounds about right?” (Note 2)

“I got a lot of reaction, yes, but all rather sad, huh! One friend whom we met in the Portslade yoga studio has two sons in their early twenties. The older one did a Video Gaming course at university; “Bullied online over the last few days. Really awful; impacted his physical and emotional well-being; seems as though younger people are losing their kindness and the ability to discuss differences openly and curiously without judgment; he had to remove himself from one gaming group.”

“You may have read about 66-year-old Martin Speake, who taught jazz for 22 years at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London?”

“Not a name that rings any bells. Tell me more?”

“It’s a complex story with many nuances but in essence when Speake was asked for feedback on the school’s equality and diversity policy, he said he didn’t agree that black musicians were discriminated against in the UK’s jazz scene (Note 3). Martin Speake is white. His response was ‘shared’, his classes were boycotted …. and he was eventually forced to resign. It was claimed by a student that his email has made black musicians feel unsafe at Trinity. He believes that students are treated like customers so they’re in charge but they don’t have the maturity to know what they are doing; ‘they have destroyed my life’.”

“That’s such a sad reflection on the world in which we live. We can only hope that common sense will return. By the way, I know you read The Times; did you see the obituary of Cherry Hill?”

“Never heard of her, no.”

“She was a prize-winning model maker, who spent a lifetime creating elaborate scaled-down versions of Victorian traction engines and other machines, some of which had not even been built at full size.”

“And why are you mentioning her?”

“Because I was astounded by her skill and attention to detail. I took this screen shot of her model of a Blackburn agricultural engine of 1857:

“Wow! That’s incredible. Incidentally, you asked whether I had lots of comments about my last PC. Yes, but PCs 417 and 419 (Have you Read …) were equally popular. One of my readers, Priscilla Goslin, author of ‘How to Be a Carioca’ (Note 4), not only passed them on to one of her adult sons, who has ‘difficulty of letting go of past disappointments’, but also admitted to having copy of Zen Flesh Zen Bones: ‘on my shelf forever. I’ve never known anyone who had it! I can still recite a few of the stories.’ Priscilla lives 50/50 in Brazil and the USA.

Before I go, Mo, I thought you would be amused at my recent stupidity. We get so used to doing things online that when someone I know said they were going to see an acupuncturist, I immediately asked: “Is that online or are you going to their practice? Bye ….”

Good to chat!  

Richard 17th January 2025

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 R&R is an abbreviation for Rest & Recuperation, a term I first came across in 1973. Halfway through our four-month operational tour in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, we had three days ‘R&R’. Those soldiers who were married flew back home to Germany, those who were single flew to the UK mainland. After living in a heightened state of alert for weeks, it was weird and strange to re-enter ‘normal life’, even for a few days.

Note 2 The phrase may date from the English Civil War (August 1642 – September 1951) when Coventry had a military prison. Others suggest it dates from the C18th when Coventry was the nearest town to London that lay outside the jurisdiction of the Bow Street Runners, so London criminals would flee there to escape arrest.

Note 3 Probably some ‘tick box’ survey.

Note 4. An international best seller since 1992, this is a humorous look at what makes up one of the world’s most colourful characters – the Carioca, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

PC 414 It’s all about the B

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Some months ago, we had a couple of people who share our passion for hot yoga around for supper. Always a surprise to see other hot yoga enthusiasts with clothes on, as in the studio you need to wear as little as possible. One, Serena Wells, is a graduate of Brighton University where she studied Fashion Textiles and specialises in using colour to create bold, graphic works, often silk on silk. She currently has a design studio in Brighton. Her parents were from Guyana. (Note 1) The other, Armando Colucci, known to everyone as Armi, is an Italian from Naples who works as a head trainer for the hair products company Schwarzkopf. We sit down to a simple supper and the conversation starts. It wasn’t the first question but at some time Armi asked:

“Have you always lived in Brighton?”

That’s when the thought went ‘ping’!

“No. I was actually born in Bath ……”

Pulteney Bridge over the River Avon in Bath

…… and I realised that ‘B’ was a linking letter to a great number of places I have lived in! I could hear myself talking about being born in Bath (PCs 164 & 165), how I went to the first of three boarding schools there and how my parents had divorced.

Then my mother remarried and she and my stepfather moved away and my mind went into another subconscious loop about how they moved to Balcombe, too far away for more than one visit each term, the two-day half term.

Brighton’s where the blue spot is. Bath top left.

Balcombe is a little village some 18 miles north of Brighton. (See PC 58 Going Home December 2015). I remember a first Geography lesson at Daunsteys’, a public school in Wiltshire; ‘write an essay about where you live’ and Balcombe was by comparison to Bath very small, so I volunteered that it had a population of 300. These days I’d simply ask Google and get a reasonably accurate figure. The master, Mr Taylor, put a red ‘1’ before the 300; I guess the village had a large catchment area.

The Half Moon Inn in the centre of Balcombe circa 1961

It had a good steam train service to London Victoria and to Brighton, and a regular bus service to Haywards Heath, the local town where there were many shops and the Perrymount cinema, where the auditorium was divided into ‘smoking’ and ‘non-smoking’ sections. We went to the Theatre Royal, Brighton for pre-London productions or to the ice rink for a fun afternoon.

On the way to Haywards Heath the road passed over the River Ouse and to its west was the magnificent Ouse Viaduct, known locally as the Balcombe Viaduct.

My next ‘B’ would have been Bielefeld, a town in what was then West Germany, where the British Army had a large Headquarters and where I met my first wife. I was stationed in both Lippstadt and Sennelager, ten miles away. Returning to the UK for a staff role and Staff College, after a stint in the Ministry of Defence I took over an Air Defence battery in Wing Barracks in Bulford, a few miles north of Salisbury.

Wing Barracks, Bulford being demolished in the C21st!

Thoughts tumble through my subconscious like cereal into a bowl at breakfast. My mind leapt to London where I bought a rather dingy basement flat on the south side of Clapham Common, across the Common from Battersea. For those of us of a certain age, Battersea will for ever be associated with Peter Sellers and his ‘Balham – Gateway to the South’ radio skit. “We enter Balham through the verdant grasslands of Battersea Park, stretching for more than half an acre …..” or something like that! I toyed with the idea of buying a house just south of Basingstoke, southwest of London in Hampshire, but there were too many issues that couldn’t be resolved and I pulled out.

In 2000 I bought a terraced house in Bramfield Road, Battersea and nine years later attended my first session in Hot Yoga South, Balham, a ten-minute cycle ride away; the start of a continuing journey. Battersea is another London village that went from rather down at heel to being an attractive place to live, particularly for ‘Yummy Mummies’. So much so that the road at the bottom of Bramfield Road, Northcote Road, was known as Nappy Valley. 

Northcote Road, Battersea

My life moved on and through my regular hot yoga practice I met Celina.

Bournemouth Beach

Wanting to live on the south coast and needing to be able to practise Hot Yoga regularly, Celina and I identified where that was possible. We had a weekend in Bournemouth and went to two classes in the studio in Boscombe. For me, Bournemouth will always be associated with an uncle’s brother, a chap called Ken Bailey who was awarded the Freedom of the City for his work with the young. (There’s another B!). Boscombe is somewhat rundown, what might be called a ‘white trash’ area; sad, gaunt, pale faces, skinny bodies, dressed in black. We decided to look in Brighton. We knew the studio owners in Brighton and here were more options. We bought in Hove, practised in Portslade until 2018, then moved to practise in Yoga In The Lanes in Middle Street, Brighton.

Brighton of course is a city of contrasts, although in the early C20th its seedier side seemed to colour its reputation; in the 1930s – “Queen of Slaughtering Places”! Now it’s better known for its thriving arts scene and laissez faire attitude, for its Pride Parade in August and for its Palace Pier, and a beach of pebbles.  

The Peace Statue on the boundary between Brighton and Hove

It’s just a coincidence, these Bs; obviously could easily have been A or C.
These thoughts had drifted through my brain in a few seconds but suddenly I was aware that Serena was asking me a question about my paintings, and I needed to become fully conscious!

Never imagined I would return to Brighton & Hove!

Richard 22nd November 2024

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 The explorer Lucy Shepherd traversed the Guyana jungle from the east to the border with Brazil in the west, on foot in 50 days. Watch ‘Secret Amazon: Into the Wild’ on You Tube or Channel 4. Don’t if the idea of Bushmaster snakes terrifies you.

Note 2 My Podiatrist thinks Bath is ‘posh’.

PC 413 Hope in The Autumn (continues from PC 411)

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“That was a long break, Richard!”

“Yes. Sorry! Got caught by Libby who wanted to give me an update on Susie.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Libby thinks she’s enjoying her course which should finish before Christmas. Obviously now looking where she can apply new-found her skills.” (Note 1)

“Unlikely we will see her back behind the counter! Sad but life moves on and so it should. We were talking about what The Times’ obituary writers had said about General Sir Mike Jackson. Always interesting to read the obituaries of others, not that I imagine for one second that mine will feature in a national newspaper.”

“Maybe, maybe not! The obituary writers must have a fun if not conflicting time deciding who to include. Did you see that one last month about possibly the last ‘ice harvester’?”

“No ….”

“In an age when a refrigerator and freezer are considered essential gadgets, we forget some of the ingenious ways our forebears used to keep food fresh. One such device was an ice box, made of wood or metal. Food was placed in the bottom and an ice block in the top compartment. Cold air falls so keeping the food fresh.”

“OK. I’ve seen some on visits to National Trust properties, but who was this ice harvester?”

“Actually an Ecuadorian named Baltazar Ushca, who for more than 60 years climbed the slopes of Mount Chimborazo, the tallest mountain in Ecuador, to harvest the ice that covers the dormant volcano. “It’s the tastiest and the sweetest, full of vitamins for your bones,” he explained of the frozen water, which glistens in the sunlight like a huge diamond.”

“Now I know something about Mount Chimborazo. Its summit, over 6000m if I remember correctly (Note 2), is the point on earth closest to the sun, as it sits just one degree south of the Equator, where the Earth’s bulge is at its greatest. But why did The Times decide his life was worth remembering?”

Mount Chimborazo

“Probably to mark the end of a traditional way of life. At one time there were up to 40 ice harvesters, known as hieleros, including his brothers Gregorio and Juan. “We would go out in a group of friends, four or six groups, twice a week,” he explained in his native Quechua language. “I would go with my mother and father, with my brothers and sisters.” Gradually their number dwindled. Ushca, who was born in 1944 and started the five-hour trek to the top of the mountain aged 15, was believed to be the last one.”

Baltazar at work

“Ah! That’s both fascinating and sad. I haven’t been anywhere in South America, let alone Ecuador, although Rio and Machu Picchu are on my bucket list. And now, Richard, I need to get going as I promised my mother we’d meet in M&S in Brighton. She wants to buy some clothing staples and M&S’s very good for these. See you ……”

I sat back, relishing the agreeable atmosphere in the café, and was thinking of getting my iPad out to read the day’s news when I saw Sami coming through the left hand door.

“Hey Sami! A belated Happy Birthday for the 24th. Us Scorpios must stick together!”

“Afternoon Richard. How was your birthday?”

“Actually lovely and rather drawn out. The week after we went to Chichester for lunch with my brother and then had Jade and the boys down. They just LOVE Brighton; Lego shop, VR business, lunch down on the pebbles at Captain’s, then an hour on the pier. For some strange reason they had never been on it, so the excitement levels were sky high. And Candyfloss is a favourite – on a stick of course.”

“I bet they went for a swim before going home?”

“They did indeed …… and had a slice of cake. Actually it was a very drawn out birthday as my mother-in-law made me a cake when we were in Estoril last week!”

“And have they moved yet? I remember your daughter was buying a derelict house that her maternal grandmother had lived in. How’s that going?”

“Water under the bridge! A very stressful two months but they completed a week ago and have moved into a rented house until Christmas. They have replumbed and rewired, fitted a new bathroom and now have six weeks to fit the kitchen and windows. Certainly doable!”

“Thank you for the update. Good luck to them. You know Paul Simons, who writes a column in The Times about weather?”

“Yes. He digs up really interesting information. What’s piqued your interest this week?”

“A place in Australia called Coober Pedy. Australia is expected to face one of its hottest summers on record and, even though it’s spring in the southern hemisphere, a couple of weeks ago South Australia had its highest temperature for 29 years when the outback town of Coober Pedy recorded 43.7C.”

Red marks Coober Pedy

“Never heard of Coober Pedy. Tell me more?” (Note 3)

“Well, Coober Pedy is a remote mining town in the South Australian desert and has the largest opal mine in the world. When miners arrived in 1915 they soon found life was far more bearable underground, inside disused mine shafts, than above ground in the heat. So they began digging out their own subterranean homes and today it’s a grand subterranean town with restaurants, bars, art galleries, a bookshop, churches and even a four-star luxury hotel, all built to escape the desert heat. Temperatures below ground stay at a surprisingly pleasant 23C-25C throughout the year without any need for air conditioning. How about that!”

An underground Air BnB in Coober Pedy

“Never been to South Australia; maybe I should put it on my list. Incidentally you read my postcard entitled ‘The Snail aka Brian’ (PC 406 Sep 2024)? Well, there was a lovely little cartoon on Facebook the other day which certainly made me smile.

And now we need to get going as I see Duncan wants to close. Love to Lisa and see you soon.”

“Great cartoon! Love to Celina. Good to see you. Take care.”

Richard 15th November 2024

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 After her late ‘Gap Year’, when Susie spent some time in New Zealand and Australia, she started a course on Logistics, with the intention of getting involved in the wholesale side of commerce.  

Note 2 Mount Everest, for comparison, is 8849m above sea level.

Note 3 Unbelievably Kay, our masseuse, had a one-year dance contract Australian tour that included a performance in Coober Pedy in 1988. ‘Very Red-neck!’