A lament for letters

Sitting in the bathroom reading the last volume of the collected letters of Virginia Woolf (Leave the letters till we’re dead, letters 1936-41, edited by Nicholson, 1980) — something struck me. When was the last time I wrote a real live letter, as in with pen and paper and an envelope that I had to take to a post office or postbox in the street? As it happens, obsessive that I am, the date and time was easily pinned down through my diaries (…and who keeps a diary now I wonder) — and it was October 11, 1999 and to my wife, then in Pakistan, sorting out a few things before returning to UK to do her Masters.

The Age of Letters is past. There will be no more collections of the musings of literary lions or us less exalted. As the internet shrinks the space between all of us the archaisms of ink bottles and fountain pens are fading fast. Writing, as in using a cursive script, may also disappear in parts of the world as technology advances and voice-recognition computing is of sufficient quality that the emails of tomorrow will be dictated rather than tapped out on a keyboard.

My library shelves hold dozens of volumes of letters. Of late I have been seeking out the letters written during the Raj years from husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, who found themselves in India and chronicled their lives in ‘letters home’. A surprising number were kept and then collected, edited and published and they make for fascinating reading.

There is an intimacy about a letter that you never get with electronic comms, a sense of the person on the other side of the paper, their presence somehow folded into the envelope, an elusive miasma there between the sheets that you can hold to your nose and just faintly catch the scent of the writer.

That intimacy can be preserved over time, and the postal services of nations worldwide provided a window on history that has a permanence about it that is never going to be matched in the ephemeral and transitory emails and tweets that are today’s bread-and-butter comms-wise. There is no more ‘waiting for the postman’ — the Woolf letters revealed that there were up to nine deliveries a day in central London in the 1930s, the last at 7pm — and who today has a letter knife, or an inkwell for that matter?

Does it matter, this loss of a handwritten heritage? The hard-nosed cynic in me says ‘no’. Everything that was new 20 years ago is 20 years old now. When I travel I carry an iPod not a Sony Walkman. The video-cassettes are long gone and my hi-fi systems (yes… there are more than one) talk to the internet which is how I listen to most radio, and the majority of my music is now delivered via a digital source.

And I don’t get letters anymore other than official notifications of changes to pension payments or reminders to renew my subscription of the BBC Music Magazine. No envelopes with familiar handwriting that can be put to one side and then later opened and read often slowly and carefully, with a cup of tea and a biscuit, with cat on lap.

Yet there are letters. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. They sit in files at the back of my office awaiting editing — something of a faint hope I suspect — and they are a record of much of my life and times in Pakistan between November 1993 when I wrote my first from here to there, and 1999 when I wrote my last from there to here. After that… not very much. Printouts of a few emails but thin pickings for anybody going through my papers after my death. In those files is a complete record, both sides of the conversation, of a courtship that was conducted over nearly two years entirely by letter. The evolution of a relationship that is now 22-year-old can be charted. Mine written in sepia ink, hers in ball-pen. The fountain pen and the inkbottle are on my writing desk now, relics. Right… time to mow today’s crop of emails I suppose… tootle-pip!

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2015.

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