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HIS, I’d say, is the week when we gave up on the post, on letters. That’s how history happens: in unobtrusive ways as well as with bangs and whistles.
I had a party, as per usual, for the Epiphany on Friday. All the guests wrote an email to thank me — my friends are nice like that. But in happier days, they’d have held out to send me a postcard with a few graceful words of thanks: what used to be called a bread and butter thank you letter. But that was then, when you might expect a letter with a first class stamp to arrive the next working day. Hah. A few friends may still write, but knowing it might take days to arrive. This is where we’re at right now thanks to the mismanagement of Royal Mail: a uniquely valuable medium has died a death to be replaced by email and WhatsApp.
Actually, it’s not quite true that letter writing is dead: one friend did write to say thank you for her Christmas presents, but she took the precaution of delivering it by hand before returning to Hereford, on the basis that you really couldn’t tell how long it would be before a card reaches London from that challenging outpost. The Victorians would have delivered it that very day.
Even before the postal strikes, the demographic that writes letters was being replaced by the age group that uses assorted forms of social media. It was increasingly the old or the posh who wrote letters. Last week a friend asked me despairingly if I happened to have writing paper to write to her elderly aunt in Monaghan because she had scoured the shops in vain for it. It tells you something that it’s hard even to find the means to write a letter. That’s before paying nearly a quid for a stamp. The uniquely rubbish Royal Mail management is forever telling us that the number of letters is in decline as an excuse for cutting services; well, duh, that’s what happens when you make the service unaffordable. Cause and effect.
Here’s how you can really date the brilliant ITV series on John Stonehouse, the politician who disappeared. He boasts about introducing a new, two tier postal service as Postmaster General where the first class post is guaranteed to arrive the next morning rather than afternoon. That was 1974; is there any chance of returning to the heady days of the Seventies?
If we lose letters, we lose a unique medium. On the bright side, if you do send a letter, you’ll stand out as someone who makes an effort. Bear that in mind.
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