Valentine’s Day still has me thinking…

… about the lost art of letter writing. It was sparked off by a line in Christina Jones’s book Moonshine. The sixteen year old Elvi is hopelessly lost in first love and can’t text her beloved for fear of having her phone confiscated. How she longs to contact her boyfriend but knows a letter would take ages to reach its desired destination. How, she wonders, did people ever manage in the ‘olden days’ before texts, emails and mobiles?

As someone who managed – quite well thank you very much – to communicate with boyfriends before the great age of technology, I thought back to the love letters I’d received. Not being overly sentimental and a keen mover of house, I haven’t kept much of my past. No school reports thank goodness (‘Georgia tries her hardest’ was the usual damning comment) no Valentine’s cards, no wedding invitations or orders of service. I’m afraid they get thrown, or rather, recycled. The only letter I kept for ages was an invitation to a friend’s Hindu wedding as it was simply the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen – a symphony of expensive gold and red. Gorgeous. No – the only sentimental bits of paper I’ve kept are a few love letters written to me by a boyfriend who when, as our college term dates didn’t coincide, had to leave for home before me. He wrote every day. Every day! There’s romance for you. Hard to believe that I could inspire such devotion. But I did. And how did I repay it? Erm … I’m afraid I dumped him for another in the second year, all six foot two of ardent blonde youth of him too. Foolish girl! But his letters were good. Nothing slushy, just a sort of diary of his day and how much he missed me. I suppose nowadays we’d text but back in the ‘80s (hard for those of Elvi’s generation to believe I know) we had no cell phones, no laptops and the only landline phone at college was on a shared hallway where everyone could listen in. Hardly ideal for young love. So, we wrote letters! Compared to the great love letters in literature I’m sure they were nondescript but it still gave me a thrill to peer into the ‘H’ pigeonhole in student halls for the familiar blue envelope.

It’s still a joyous experience to hear that little plopping sound as the post lands on the doormat. There’s always the promise it might bring an invitation to something nice, a letter from an old friend or a post card from somewhere lovely. Or even just a silly card from someone who’s thinking of me.
So although we have these swathes of wonderful gadgets (and I’m as much of a technophile as the rest of you, can’t wait to get my first ipad or whatever they’re called) I wonder if we reserve snail-mail for those really important things?

After all, you can’t put a Valentine’s text up on the mantelpiece and gaze longingly at it, can you?