Sunday 26 August 2012

Please Mr Postman


From the exotic Netherlands.... Shocking Blue

The other day I received a beautiful handwritten – handwritten! – letter from an old friend.  She’d embellished the edges of the notepaper with decorative squirls and even the little PTO in the bottom right corner was executed in a fancy script.  It took me right back just to see her handwriting again.  Just about the only handwriting I see, or do myself, is on shopping lists, post-it notes and cheques: unimaginative and functional reminders of  life’s most boring bits.  Whereas, letters… letters can be so much more.

As a child I was a keen letter-writer.  I never wrote to Father Christmas, though, because I figured that if he was smart enough to get into our house which had a wall-mounted gas fire and no chimney, then he probably had sufficient magical powers to know what I wanted without me having to spell it out.   However, the first letter I ever wrote was soon after he’d made his superhuman entrance, when I sent a little note to my Nan and Granddad thanking them for my present.  (Proof if any were needed that Father Christmas did have the miraculous ability to get it from them to the pillowcase at the end of my bed, even if it meant secreting himself in through a gas pipe.)  Nan wrote lovely letters back on small sheets of  blue Basildon Bond, in her traditional old-fashioned fountain pen handwriting, where all the characters were very even and modest. Somehow, her sweet letters felt like virtual hugs.

Around the age of eleven, I got into penfriends.  Being a precocious little twat I only wanted foreign penfriends and the more exotic the country, the better.  For a while I exchanged letters with a Swede, a New Zealand Maori and the daughter of the Jamaican Ambassador for Haiti - see what I mean?!  However, my favourite penpal for a couple of years was Mandeep.  Mandeep was a Kenyan Indian Sikh and, best of all, a boy.

Mandeep wrote the most beautiful letters.  He was articulate and imaginative, and even his handwriting looked intelligent, somehow – slightly sharp edges made it appear confident, while the characters with descendents had large flamboyant curls… passionate curls.  When those folded blue aerogrammes with his handwriting on came through my letterbox I felt new things.  Letters from Mandeep made my heart skip and my head rush in ways I’d never known before, nor really understood. 

The eleven-year old me fell a little bit in love with Mandeep, or at least with the idea of him, and it seemed to be mutual.  Gradually we began to write quite romantically… paying compliments in the most touching of ways, hinting at something between us that we didn’t quite comprehend and allowing each other to read between the lines.  He had a poetic turn of phrase and was never boring.  By the age of twelve, in my imagined future, I was going to marry this exotic, dark-skinned boy and have his babies, and all because of the way he wrote.  I hadn’t even seen his picture.

Of course the dream was shattered when we eventually met.  He came to the UK to stay with some cousins and incorporated a side trip to see me.  It felt like a huge event, and it was perhaps inevitable that it would be a let-down, as well as one of the most awkward, cringe-worthy days of my life.  We were both embarrassed, inhibited and painfully shy.  He was nothing like I’d imagined; it was as if the skinny adolescent boy sitting there on my sofa nibbling on a Barmouth biscuit and struggling for words was an entirely different person to the hero of my romantic fantasy who wrote those thoughtful, exciting letters, and I know my disappointment was reciprocated.   After that, our exchanges immediately lost their magic and stopped soon after.

Perhaps letters are best used as an extension of a friendship or connection you’ve already made?  Or when you meet someone occasionally but not often enough, and writing can keep the bond strong.  Up until email took the place of letters, I was still using pen and paper to write long, rambling missives to distant friends, enjoying the very craft of expression through the written word.  The actual, physical written word.  Likewise I’d still get that extra special pleasure from a handwritten reply, the sight of an individual’s distinctive script, even just the knowledge that their pen had touched the paper and their hand had held the pen gave it more of a connection.  I love email for all the obvious reasons, and a lot of the time I couldn’t be doing with all that tiresome scribing any more when I can type quickly instead, but a bit of me misses that extra something that you give – and get - with a handwritten letter.  If it wasn’t for the cost of stamps and the threat of an aching wrist I might send more.


17 comments:

  1. Interesting one if you are old enough to remember the thrill of receiving a letter from a loved one. I suppose it is a bit like the LP and file syndrome...

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    1. Indeed, OPC, and it shows my age!
      I know I'm in danger of sounding overly nostalgic (ha! too late!) but I don't think there's anything wrong with us appreciating some things being more personalised, sensual even. Oh for a letter with a lock of hair enclosed and the faint scent of someone's perfume on the paper ;-) Tho' of course it would depend on who it was from - might seem a bit strange with the bill from British Gas...

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  2. That is lovely handwriting..it's steady and regular but full of personality.

    I loved writing letters(almost as much as getting them)but I was so slow about it. I don't actually think about things before I write them. With a backspace it's not as bad (though all you have to do is look at some of my comments here to see how riddled my writing is with typos) but with a pen....getting to the bottom of the page without ruining it was a real cliffhanger. And I was always drawing pictures...illustrations.

    I do miss the letters but they were painful to write.

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    1. Thanks, it's not always quite that regular and I do tend to write lines on the slant, whatever that says!
      I know exactly what you mean about the backspace though. I sometimes roughed out my letters first, or there was a danger of sending ten pages of crossings out. Great that you illustrated yours too, will the recipients have kept them?

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    2. I don't know but, there are some that I certainly hope have been destroyed. :)

      The last one I wrote was to Dr. Zale...a professor that became a close family friend. I wrote it from New Haven Connecticut and it featured a large illustration of dead skunks.

      The road we lived on had more skunks than people.

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  3. I never did the pen pal thing but I always kind of wanted to. I guess blogging and Facebook have to suffice.

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    1. I guess it is. I don't do FB but blogging satisfies some of that writing urge at least...

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    2. Come over to FB, C (he says in the ominous tones of the Devil)- good way to connect & exhibit yourself (!). Nice article. I miss letters too, and have hundreds stashed away which act as instant portals to other times, places & faces whenever I open them.

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    3. Thanks, ehi, but I can't be tempted to FB... In keeping with your ominous Devil tones, it all feels a bit too Faustian for me somehow! Besides, I'd never get anything else done...
      I was pleasantly surprised to hear how you and others here have kept old letters. It shows they were worth writing in the first place, and is a nice contrast to the way so much communication is fleeting and disposable now.
      (Slightly worried though now that anyone has kept any of my old letters...)

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  4. Like you, I had a couple of pen-pals when I was young (though none in such exotic locations - hello Sue in Leeds!) and the composition of a letter, then waiting for one in return took patience and couldn't be hurried. I also used to enjoy writing the thank-you letters after birthdays and Christmas almost as much as opening the presents. I was very diligent!

    Nowadays messages are instant and I rarely put pen to paper at all - I haven't actually handwritten a proper letter for years. Predictive text and spell-checks have replaced the pen and the trusty dictionary. The days of the (hand)written word are well and truly numbered. Will it even matter to the next generation?

    A lovely little story about Mandeep by the way. I wonder where he is now? Checking his e-mails like the rest of us probably!

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    1. You've summed it up about patience. I don't suppose I'd have that much patience now - you get used to everything being so instant - but you had to have it with letters/penpals and it did help build up the anticipation, didn't it?
      Who knows where Mandeep is now, but I've absolutely no desire to seek him out, which I think is probably a good thing!

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  5. My friends and I wrote voraciously to one another when we all went off to different universities in 1982. I kept every letter and by the end of the three years, I'd accumulated an entire black bin bag full of multicoloured envelopes containing my chums' various loves, lives and mishaps. In return, of course, they got mine.

    My collection stayed at my Mum's house for years in the bottom of my old wardrobe, until the time came for me to finally deal with them. As I was moving to a small flat with my boyfriend (now hubby), space was at a premium. To my eternal regret, I selected two small bundles of letters and cards - one from The Girls, one from The Boys - and placed them in two shoeboxes which I still own and cherish. The rest, I'm sad to say, went up in smoke in my Mums' back garden.

    Now, if an email from a chum is extra special or extra funny, I will print it off and keep it. That much I have learned.

    I love the story of Mandeep. Imagine the turn your life might have taken if he'd lived up to his promise on paper...

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    1. Ah I bet those letters could make you smile, laugh, cry, blush and despair... Some letters could be like the pages of diaries at times too, so personal. I think it's great that you kept any - I haven't, sadly. I tried not to keep too much 'stuff', but these days still end up retaining those special emails, like you, and they're the closest thing to those old letters.

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  6. The demise of the handwritten letter is one of the great losses of our age. The collected letters of Keats (to take one fine example) are well worth reading and give us an insight into the heart of another. Would we ever care to read his collected e-mails? ('Hi Fanny. Great seeing you at Hunt's party the other day. Fancy meeting up for a latte? John')

    When I was a young, pretentious, undergraduate, I would exchange letters with all my friends throughout any long periods of being apart (usually holidays). I still have nearly all of them in a box in the attic and treasure them dearly. Of course, often they were full of ridiculous tosh which I would like to think I would be embarrassed to write now but that was who we were. I cannot remember the last time I received a handwritten letter which I opened in great anticipation. I cannot remember how many years it has been since I wrote one that someone may have been pleased to receive. My handwriting is now pretty appalling through lack of use. It's true that modern technology, right here, right now beneath my very fingers and before my eyes, has give us a great deal but I wonder if what we have lost in the process is even greater? I'm beginning to think Blur were right...modern life IS rubbish.

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    1. Funnily enough I had been looking at those old Keats-Fanny Brawne letters a little while back and thinking how they would now be emails too.
      As with Kolley Kibber above, it's nice that you still have your old letters and I do rather miss mine; although I don't want to wallow too much in my past but at the same time they're a little piece of personal history.
      I'm ambivalent about modern technology... so glad for its ease of use and speed etc. when that's what you need (in my line it would take so long and cost so much to get images to clients without it - scanning/emailing is such a boon. I used to have to go into town to the photocopy shop, wait in a queue to get them copied, the machine would break down just before it was my turn, etc. etc...)
      But there's always a trade-off isn't there? Like you I see the demise of the hand-written letter as a loss. Maybe we'll have to write a few just to get the feeling back!

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  7. Brilliant post on the post! Over the weekend and old friend I'd become re-acquainted with from ages ago told me she'd found a box of old letters and postcards from me and how I was the last person she knew who did that, sadly in this modern age I don't get the time to anymore, though I suppose 75% of it is through a lack of decent postcards!

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    1. Hi Wilthomer - nice to see you again! That's quite something that your old friend kept them all... strange really because I suppose at the time of writing you/we never gave much consideration to have any permanence really. As you say, time is definitely an issue though. As for postcards, I think the best ones are those art ones you get from galleries and museums, either those or ones so cheap and tacky that you can hardly believe they were ever made (from one extreme to the other...!) I do still have a small collection of postcards (from both categories) that I can't part with.

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