There’s no reason for a rational person to post a letter these days, Joe Bennett says.
“Well, if you really want to know – though I’m not sure it will lead to a productive conversation – I was posting a letter.
“No no, not posting as in posting online. Posting as in, well, a post-box.
“Really? Gosh. Well, now you know what they’re for, don’t you?
“No, no need to apologise. Posting a letter these days is like riding a penny farthing. It’s something that only a few …
“No, farthing. With a th. It was a coin, a quarter of a penny, and so a penny-farthing was – but let’s not worry about what a penny-farthing was. My point is that hardly anyone posts letters any more.
“Parcels, yes. Parcel post is booming because everyone now orders tat they don’t need direct from some sweat shop in Guangzhou, without having any idea where Guangzhou is, or indeed how to spell it.
“And it’s tempting to see the rise of parcel post and the decline of letters as symptomatic of, well, everything, with a boom in consumption being accompanied by a slump in literacy. It stems, of course, from the heavily advertised delusion that happiness comes from filling a house with shoddy, whereas the truth of things is and always has been that the happiness of any human being is directly related to…
“Sorry, yes, there I go again, getting on to my high horse. Though, actually, tall horse might make more sense. Pegasus was a high horse.
“No, no, it was a horse with wings.
“Well no, not actual wings. Not an actual horse, either, come to that. Pegasus was …it doesn’t matter. It was meant to be, well, a joke. But where were we?
“You’re quite right. There’s no reason for a rational person to post a letter these days. It’s absurdly expensive, the chances of the thing arriving aren’t much better than 50/50, and the chances of it arriving promptly, by which I mean within a day or so, which was the norm throughout the country only 20 years ago, are nil. If it’s economy or efficiency you’re after, send an email.
“But, and here’s the nub of it, who ever hugged an email, sniffed it, kissed it, slept with it under the pillow, tied it with ribbon and kept it for a lifetime? Or indeed who ever stared at an email in disbelief, screamed, tore the thing in two and then burst into tears?
“Yes, I do realise you’d have to print it off first, by which time the emotion might have dwindled a bit, but my point is that a letter carries a heft that you just don’t get from email, or indeed from any of those other nightmare entities such as Instagram or TikBloodyTok, which exist for two reasons only. One is to enable teenage girls the better to bully each other, and the other and more significant is to let rapacious corporations pry ever deeper into our predilections in order to manipulate us for their own gain. In comparison with all of which the private letter, which has been chugging along in various forms for several thousand years, has the integrity and simplicity of innocence itself.
“Yes, as you say, it does take effort to sit down and write the thing and find an envelope and a stamp and then lug it to the post box, but that is almost as much the point of a letter as the letter itself. For at its best, a letter is a gift, an expression of fellow-feeling from one person to another, and who doesn’t want and need a bit of fellow-feeling?
“Writing is the greatest of all inventions. It takes the spoken word, which is the repository of thought and feeling, and instead of letting it scatter on the wind it pins it down on paper for eternity. So every letter is a record of life lived, thoughts thought and feelings felt.
“Until only a few years ago it was common to publish the collected letters of significant people because in the letters lay the whole self. Great chunks of the Bible were written as letters. Entire novels have been written in the form of letters. I know a play consisting only of two actors reading out the letters that their characters have exchanged over 50 years – and it makes you weep.
“So when you saw me just now posting a letter I was maintaining a tradition that goes back millennia and yet has withered to almost nothing in just 20 years and within another 20 will be dead as the dodo.
“What? No, not a rap-artist, as it happens – as if that weren’t inherently an oxymoron – but a bird, a flightless bird that ... forget it. It doesn’t matter.”