Opening the Mail

I remember the days when getting a letter used to be fun. Today I opened the post and had received: Gas bill £402, Electricity bill £319 and Vehicle Tax notification £250. No love letters, no winnings from any competition I forgot I had entered, nothing nice at all in fact. Possibly this is my fault. I can't remember when I last wrote a chatty letter; stuff tends to be more impersonal and electronic these days. The only way to 'personalise' an e-mail being a naff little symbol made up of the largely forgotten parts of the computer keyboard; the semi colon and colon. With a real letter you could choose the paper, the type of pen, the colour of the ink. You could embellish it with pictures and squirt perfume over it, or in the case of a sad letter, let your tears drip onto the page and blur the ink. Whatever happened to the 'SWALK' on the back of the envelope, raising hopes of intimate secrets on the inside? How wonderful, to pick up a letter and run to your room and fling yourself on the bed to enjoy it, how much more romantic than opening an e-mail on a monitor in an office area. What about the bundles of love letters tied up in red ribbon and stowed away in the attic to ready to be discovered long after your death and published in a best selling book? And if you were getting a letter from an ancient relative, you could tell by the handwriting how frail they were. I believe somewhere the last letter written in 1545 by Sir Thomas Moore while awaiting his death in the Tower of London still exists. It was written on scraps of paper with a piece of coal. Not at all the same experience as an e-mail with a 'sad face motif'from a laptop would have been, or a posting on a Social Networking 'Wall' with a mood indicator note (not sure what you could choose for 'about to be beheaded').

The digital revolution has its benefits, but maybe we've lost something of the real depth of communication in translation.