Writing

Dear Reader

I do like to write. That may seem obvious from the fact that I am writing this blog, but I don’t mean that, or my ambition to write a book or several. I mean I like to write letters, to friends and family, with a pen.

Don’t get me wrong I also love the communication potential of the internet and the immediate access you have to your loved ones via facebook, email and the like, but there is nothing like writing, and dare I say receiving a proper letter.

I am of an age, where letters came first. At school my mother and I would write long, descriptive letters to each other. She describing her and my father’s life in the Middle East and the progress of my then baby brother, me my adolescent antics at a girls’ boarding school in Oxfordshire. Somehow I think she knew more about my life and my friends because of this than she would have known if I had lived at home with them. In the long summer holidays we girls would write to each other, on thin airmail paper or those folding up things, where the words were restricted by the size of the paper. It makes you precise I suppose.

Last year I made a resolution to write at least one letter a month to people I care for who I haven’t contacted in a while, some of them being those same “girls” from correspondences past. I think I managed about 9 out of 12 but I intend to carry on with the practice this year. I continue to believe that they are well received!

I have some nice paper for the purpose, and I use a fountain pen, my grandad’s old Parker51 as it happens, which he gave to me when I was at University and which I have recently had serviced. It has his initials on the barrel and even though I mostly write about my family and other animals, I am reminded of him all the while. In a time before computers, it was his main communication tool, and being as he was a man of words, he used it often. The soul of the man and the memory of the words he wrote sit warmly in my hand as I settle down to write.

I have to make time for writing a letter, unlike electronic means, you cannot multi-task. It’s quiet and still and a moment of time to think about who you are writing to and what you want them to know. I prefer to be uninterrupted, but it’s easy enough to put the pen down and return to it later, and almost no danger of losing what you have already written. Most of the letters I write are family updates, so I also reflect on the things that have happened since I last wrote. For me this is as much a flexing of my increasingly poor memory muscle as it is a means to count my blessings, depending on how long it was since I last wrote.

The creation of words on the page in my ever-changing scrawl is almost magical, those streams of blue black permanent symbols coming out of the pen, making code that other people can decipher, understand and hopefully enjoy. The fluid link of mind and hand, you think the words and your hand makes them appear, this is most probably the most brilliant invention of humankind ever, everything else since is just gravy!

A hand-written letter is not perfect, you can’t go back and correct grammatical errors or repeated words, but that’s the charm. A letter is a point in time, it represents the thoughts and sometimes dreams of a person and through the pen to the page it is a gift of time, thought and for me, ritual in this age of immediacy and instant gratification.

Lots and lots of love

Mel

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