We could send letters

I really can’t remem­ber the last time I wrote a let­ter — you know, a genu­ine let­ter, on lined note­pa­per, in pen, to be put in an envel­ope, a stamp stuck on, and then pos­ted. Let­ters. As opposed to yet another ran­dom typed email. Even the last let­ters I recall writ­ing were typed on a com­puter or a port­able word pro­cessor — hardly very per­sonal. And yet I have also noticed over the past few months — via some favour­ite sites of mine — that writ­ing, par­tic­u­larly writ­ing let­ters, is exper­i­en­cing some­thing of a renais­sance on the inter­net. But so many of these let­ters are just sent into the ether. They may be inten­ded for a par­tic­u­lar per­son, but for whatever reason we don’t want to send them to the planned recip­i­ent. Many of us (includ­ing myself on occa­sions) would prefer to put a let­ter online for mass con­sump­tion, rather than post it to the per­son for whom it was inten­ded. Weird. To me, that sug­gests a some­what alarm­ing reac­tion against writ­ten let­ters, still one of the most per­sonal forms of human communication.

Per­haps that reac­tion has been caused by the fact that all the instant meth­ods of com­mu­nic­a­tion sur­round­ing us allow us not to get too deeply involved. A let­ter, scribbled or scrawled in your own hand­writ­ing, is the embod­i­ment of your per­son­al­ity. It car­ries all those famil­iar char­ac­ter­ist­ics — the style of your writ­ing, maybe an ink smudge caused by your fin­ger, the crease you made in the paper, even (if you’re so inclined) the scent you were wear­ing. And don’t for­get that you have to lick the envel­ope down and lick the back of the stamp too. How much more con­tact can you get?

On the other hand, tele­phones (par­tic­u­larly the ever-present mobiles) are prone to inter­rup­tions from what’s hap­pen­ing around you or in the back­ground. Emails are a quick and easy way to talk, but this means that they are most often writ­ten without too much advance thought or plan­ning of what needs to be said — in fact, emails are the cause of so many mis­un­der­stand­ings that we have had to invent a whole range of little sym­bols in order to cla­rify what we have just said. “You are an ignor­ant moron” needs to be imme­di­ately fol­lowed by a :-), unless you delib­er­ately want to cause offence. I have often been heard sug­gest­ing to people that dif­fi­cult sub­jects are best avoided in emails. Need­less to say, I don’t heed my own advice, and con­sequently there have been a num­ber of awk­ward moments where con­ver­sa­tions got totally out of hand due to some simple mis­un­der­stand­ing. Oh, and before any­one even sug­gests it — sorry, but text mes­sages don’t really merit con­sid­er­a­tion as a ser­i­ous form of communication.

There is, I guess, one obvi­ous reason why per­sonal com­mu­nic­a­tion has drif­ted away from writ­ing let­ters. It’s because we want instant reac­tions, and many of us also have a desire for imme­di­ate social inter­ac­tion (in other words, build your­self up a packed email address book and there’ll be someone there to talk to at almost any time of the day that you might decide to send a mes­sage). The let­ters I used to write were to my closest friends — long, ram­bling pages full of all sorts of thoughts, ideas, humour and sad­ness. And because there were far fewer ways of get­ting in touch, I was pre­pared to write the let­ter over a day or two, post it, and then wait for how­ever long it took to receive my reply. These days I know that, in my case espe­cially, I can fire off an email and have a reply within a mat­ter of minutes. Why bother with a letter?

But I do want to bother with let­ters again. I can’t prom­ise that they will be hand­writ­ten, as much as I’d like to take up my foun­tain pen once more. Due to my tend­ency to ramble on and on (oh, you’ve noticed), my writ­ing hand can’t keep up with my brain. There’s also the slight dif­fi­culty that many of the people I con­sider my closest friends and thus nat­ural cor­res­pond­ents for let­ters — well, I see them often enough, and they’re easy enough to com­mu­nic­ate with in numer­ous other ways, so I don’t really need to write to them. (Hav­ing said that, I only choose deeply inter­est­ing people as friends, so I have no doubt that many of them would be fas­cin­at­ing people to cor­res­pond with).

Who would I write to then? Well, I would return to the people with whom I used to swap reg­u­lar let­ters, in the days before long phone calls and emails became an essen­tial part of my every­day existence.

The last period of my life when let­ters meant a great deal to me was in the year or two after I gradu­ated. Let­ters were sent back and forth from uni­ver­sity friends, updat­ing each other on what we were doing, swap­ping gos­sip, prom­ising (and even­tu­ally fail­ing, if I’m totally hon­est) to keep in touch and meet up reg­u­larly. They weren’t highly per­sonal let­ters, but at a time when — like a lot of gradu­ates — I was unsure about the big wide world out­side the cam­pus walls, or the dir­ec­tion my life was tak­ing, it was often a great mor­ale booster to find a hand­writ­ten envel­ope on the doormat in the morning.

How­ever, if I was to single out one per­son who, for me, exem­pli­fies why writ­ing and receiv­ing let­ters can be so spe­cial, I’d have to go back to 1989–90, and a friend of mine with whom I’ve sadly long since lost con­tact. Her name was Sarah.

I was new to Lon­don, hav­ing just moved up from deep­est darkest Somer­set. I was tak­ing an unplanned year off before uni­ver­sity, due to a sud­den change of heart as regards courses. I didn’t know any­one, and I was in a suc­ces­sion of dead-end temp jobs. It wasn’t the most inspir­ing time. Cru­cially, the per­son I was writ­ing to was in a sim­ilar situ­ation — Sarah was retak­ing A-levels, stuck down in Somer­set after most other friends had dis­ap­peared off to uni­ver­sity, and there were vari­ous other per­sonal things hap­pen­ing too. In the midst of all this, we began a bril­liant few months of letter-writing — talk­ing about what we were doing, obvi­ously, but also relat­ing stor­ies, bizarre ideas, bits of over­heard or inven­ted con­ver­sa­tions, sur­real argu­ments or quot­ing song lyr­ics. I seem to remem­ber some let­ters even being writ­ten under pseud­onyms. It was the sort of cor­res­pond­ence where I would eagerly snatch the let­ter off the doormat, rip it open, read it through quickly, read it through slowly twice more and then, if at all pos­sible, start writ­ing my reply with the aim of get­ting it in the post by the next day.

Of course, by Octo­ber 1990 both of us headed off to uni­ver­sity at oppos­ite ends of the coun­try, and threw ourselves into stud­ies and social life. There were a couple of let­ters dur­ing our first year, but that soon petered out. Sadly, in all the house moves that I did dur­ing uni­ver­sity and after, my stack of let­ters from Sarah got lost some­where. For a long time, she has been someone I’ve been mean­ing to look up — wherever she is in the coun­try — but I’ve never got round to it. Whether or not it would be pos­sible today, it would be nice to think that we could be such enthu­si­astic cor­res­pond­ents once again.

We’d prob­ably just end up writ­ing emails to each other, though. And send­ing text mes­sages when drunk.