I've just been struggling a little to write a letter to one of Himself's great grand daughters...she's thirteen, though could just as well be thirty...we've never met her or her younger brother and sister but she wrote a letter to us not long after Christmas...all fancy twirls and squirls...and it's been nagging at me that I hadn't replied.
Because both of us refuse point blank to Skype...my reason being I'd have to comb my hair and put my teeth in and Himself because he doesn't begin to pretend to understand the on-line games and stuff the children want to talk about...neither do I actually...can't quite grasp the attraction. If it was about the latest book they'd read then that'd be different...the only child I've come across in years who reads avidly is Caitlin. And she only thirteen, but reads the same books as I do...
It is Caitlin who scorns owning a Kindle preferring...as she says...a proper book.
But the grandchildren and great grand children think books are for school, not for pleasure...not the Swedish grandchildren...but they are different.
So I wondered whatever to write about...school of course. She finds Maths and English difficult but likes Science...I told her about the donkeys and cats and dogs...then thought it was probably enough to be going on with, after I'd padded it out a bit.
There was a time when I wrote letters to friends and family...not so now though and it's a shame in very many ways because there is nothing nicer than receiving a newsy letter through the post from an old friend...it's a brief e-mail or an even briefer note on FaceAche...even worse, a quick and thoughtless enough click on the 'like' button...
Mother wrote letters each and every week in her distinctive hand...as time went on and she managed to squabble with more and more people, so her letter writing began to dwindle...she wrote on Basildon Bond writing paper...the cream coloured one because she said white paper was common...and she used the long envelopes and a proper ink pen...biros were common as well...as were small envelopes.
When I was researching the Cillins, I received some wonderful letters from elderly people...carefully written on torn off paper from lined notebooks which smelled slightly of dust and mould...one old lady, who had buried three of her stillborn babies in her local Cillin, actually wrote down the sides of the paper in the way which was common-place many years ago...she'd filled the centre of the page first...then running out of space, had written down the sides. Those letters arrived in every post...sad and heart-breaking tales of horrid priests and kindly grocers...it was the grocers who all too often supplied the orange boxes for the Father to make into a little coffin...
It was when we were in England that we found a weekly second-hand market in a local town...one of the stalls only sold ephemera...for a cardboard shoe box stuffed to the hilt with old letters and receipts...bills and Wills sealed with a dab of sealing wax...it was three pounds. How I loved those boxes...one letter I found was dated 1786...from a young man to his brother about his weekend spent in the country home of distant relatives...there were mourning letters...the pages edged in black...telling of the demise of someone in India who had succumbed to fever...telegrams brief and to the point...arrived 4.40pm...met by coachman...all well. Sometimes there'd be dance cards...but only once did I find a love letter...carefully tied in a length of faded pink ribbon. That had been written in 1862 to a girl named Alice...
There is pleasure to be had from sitting down with a cup of coffee and reading and then re-reading a proper letter from a friend...or from a grandchild.
Above and beyond the call of duty
Letter 
A Sort Of Scrambled Writing...
