The lost art of letter writing

I haven’t been doing very well on the NaBloPoMo front recently. Most of my posts in the last week seem to have consisted of memes or other things that don’t require much actual writing. I guess you can tell it’s nearly the end of the month!

I have becoming steadily worse at keeping in touch with friends via any media except email and Facebook. This week, I didn’t even remember to send my oldest friend a birthday card. Well, actually, I did remember but then just didn’t get round to doing it. I think this is somehow worse. Said card is now sitting on the desk next to my computer, looking at me and making me feel guilty. And so it should. I used to be good at writing to people. I even used to write with real pens on real paper and post them through the mail and everything. Some of them were really fat. Alas, no longer. I blame the advent of email, although I used to write lots of letters even after I started emailing people, so I shouldn’t really.

I wonder what it is, then. Laziness, I suspect. Perhaps lack of reciprocation to some extent, selfish though that may be. But I did used to enjoy writing letters, as well as receiving them (or not). Nowadays I only regularly* write paper-based letters to one university friend, who bucks the trend by being male and a letter writer. I do receive occasional pieces of post other than these letters. Sarah is quite a good correspondent, if that’s the right word. She sent me various interesting pieces of post during my recovery time, including a letter on the back of a small jigsaw puzzle, which was particularly entertaining as well as being multifunctional! I probably didn’t thank her enough at the time, but her post really cheered me up! I could take Sarah’s post as a case in point, as I don’t think I ever wrote back. Sorry, Sarah.

There is just something particularly nice about recieving a letter through the post. Even receiving nice emails doesn’t really compare, somehow. Maybe it’s the knowledge of the effort that’s gone into writing and posting the letter. Perhaps it’s the action of tearing open the envelope, anticipating the first sight of the contents. Nice though friendly emails are, clicking on an email to open it just isn’t the same.

I suppose the things that I enjoy most about writing and receiving letters are the things that put me off sending them more often. The old-fashionedness of them, the time they take to write and post, the physicality of the paper and the envelopes and the pen and the stamp, are all things that make letters pleasurable to send and receive but also things that demand more effort and resources from the sender.

I will continue to write letters, if only occasionally. I still enjoy writing the few letters that I do write and I hope the people I write to enjoy reading them. The art of letter-writing should be preserved.

*Regularly is a relative term in this context. Correspondence is sent and received on a six-monthly to yearly basis.