I've always loved writing letters. Better still, I've always loved receiving letters (there are some obvious caveats here of course...HM Customs, I'm looking at you). When I was little I remember writing some thank-you letters for birthday presents and I asked my Dad when we were going to deliver them. When he said we didn't have to; someone else would deliver them as long as we just wrote the address on the front of the card with a stamp, I just couldn't believe it. A whole new world of communication had immediately opened up right before my little eyes!
My Dad was to regret giving me this information approximately...ooh, five seconds after mentioning it, as I started writing sheaves of cards and letters to send to various friends and family members. "Stamps do cost money, you know" he grumbled, but it was too late. And when the letters started coming back...well, let's just say I was a child who was very easily pleased. I sought penpals from all corners of the globe as I was growing up, and had over fifty of them in my teens. This is probably one of the many reasons why I had no 'normal' friends at the time, but hey.
These days, I like e-mail but I really miss the times when I used to actually write to people and they wrote back; even if that takes a bit of time. Last year I read novel du jour, David Nicholls' 'One Day', and whilst I thought it was one of the worst books I'd ever read, its Eighties setting and the fact that the novel was part-epistolary brought home the point that I do take for granted how quickly you can get a response from people these days. I was born a little bit too late to appreciate the agony of asking somebody out by letter and then waiting days, if not weeks, for their reply. Most of my letters focussed on what I'd done at the weekends and how to say "Oooh, this sandwich is very nice, thank you" in German (one of my penpals was learning Spanish while I was learning German and we'd 'teach' each-other the languages in our letters...told you I was a weird kid). What with texting and Facebook and Twitter and e-mail and the like, you can ask out whoever you want in whatever way you want, and they can get back to you in seconds. But I'm not sure I'm really convinced that's such a great thing...the whole process of communication comes across as disposable, and a lot less meaningful.
It's a bit like digital cameras; great for making everyone look good because you can remove red-eye and delete those horrible ones where you're gurning drunkenly into the camera with lank hair and a double chin (not that I ever did any of that, of course). But I miss taking my camera film into Boots and then having to wait before I could see my pictures, even if I was disappointed with how I looked in them (read: every single time!). Even when the man behind the photo desk always picked the most embarrassing photo of you to go in the transparent bit on the front of the pack, so you could identify your pics. Even then.
I'm aware that this post sounds a lot like an episode of 'Grumpy Old Women', so here I shall stop, before I start offering all my readers a free bag of Werther's Originals. I'm just saying, that's all.
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