The art of letter writing

Yesterday I wrote a letter to my friend, as my email has been down for a while now. It has been so many years since I have actually written a letter using pen and paper, that I had forgotten how enjoyable it could be. Such as it is, living in a modern world, full of instant forms of communication.

I was relating this to my nephew in the evening (I have no idea what made me think it could be of interest to an 11 year old boy) when it suddenly occurred to me that this world of technology is all he has ever known. With the use of texting, email, facebook, and MSN at his disposal, he has probably never written a letter on paper in his life - and possibly never will. I showed him the writing set that I had used - the matching paper and envelopes neatly kept together in their own matching folder - and asked him if he had ever seen one before, and he admitted that he hadn't. How sad! Still, the art of letter writing can't be completely dead or I wouldn't have been able to purchase a writing set at all - although it was quite some years ago now.

I'm almost determined to make all my nieces and nephews sit down to letter writing next time they each visit! Not only have they probably never known the joy of writing one, but they have probably never received one either! Can anything be more enjoyable than receiving a handwritten letter from a dear friend, through the post? No, there is something about a handwritten letter that is much more appealing than anything typed. Even if the writer is convinced of their writing being so awful as to make it hardly legible, surely to it's recipient it is always more attractive and more warmly received than any email - even those dressed up with fancy fonts, coloured type, and patterned backgrounds.

Of course, reading Jane Austen, as I have been lately, makes me yearn for a simple life with no television, no internet, no mobile phones, and no noise from the traffic outside. People wrote to each other more then, and amused themselves with simple pleasures - playing cards, conversing together, walking together, playing music - but no doubt my ideas of how life was at that time are more romantic than they ought to be. I still crave it more than this life, however. And on that note I shall go, to switch off my central heating and to light the open fire...