Did you know that today, 1st September, is World Letter Writing Day? When was the last time you wrote a letter? I know, I can’t remember, either! The last time I wrote a proper letter, it was probably something official or a complaint. Is letter writing becoming a lost art?
The letters above are well over 100 years old. My great grandfather was a missionary in China and wrote regularly to a young lady he’d met before he left England. During his time away, he courted her and proposed to her. She was my great grandmother. His letters are very difficult to read but worth the effort. He relates his considerable (and sometimes risky) adventures, his thoughts and innermost feelings. Were it not for letters, I would not be here and neither would my brother, our children, our cousins, and so on.
When I was young, although we had landline telephones, we wrote letters. When I moved, with my family, to Malaysia in 1975, I wrote letters to the school friends I had left behind. My mother wrote weekly letters to her parents, making carbon copies (remember them?) which I still have. International phone calls were complicated to make and expensive. Even local phone calls cost money. If you were a teenager and spent too long on the phone (often in a freezing hallway if you were in the UK), your parents would tell you to hurry up and finish talking or you might risk them cutting you off mid-sentence!
Then, the digital revolution came along. Not only did we discover many different ways of keeping in touch – email, texting, WhatsApp – but we could feel connected to our friends just by seeing their posts. We didn’t need to write postcards on holiday because everyone could see what a great time we were having within seconds of the actual experience. I don’t have to wonder how my friends in Norway, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia or the US are getting on, because I can see from their Facebook posts that they are ok. This has been wonderful for me. Having been to an ex-pat school in Asia, I now have classmates all over the world and would be writing letters every day if I needed to keep in touch that way. But do they know my real thoughts or feelings? Do we exchange views or discuss deeper things? Not very often.
As a lawyer, I wrote a lot of letters. Letters to clients, to the court, to the ‘other side.’ Each recipient required a different approach. I loved that. While I was writing letters every day for work, however, I was gradually dropping the habit of writing letters to friends. We would keep in touch but we might not converse in depth and we might not take as much time as before to maintain friendships. We are all busy – I think, busier every year – and sitting down with pen and paper, finding the address and buying stamps are all things that take up precious time.
Well, writing this has made me think. Maybe it’s time to dig out the Basildon Bond and spend some time and ink connecting at a different level. What do you think?
