![\"n2875411\"](\"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/n2875411-197x300.jpg\" "\\"n2875411\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Valentine\u2019s Day still has me thinking…<\/p>\n
… about the lost art of letter writing. It was sparked off by a line in Christina Jones\u2019s book Moonshine.<\/em> The sixteen year old Elvi is hopelessly lost in first love and can\u2019t 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 \u2018olden days\u2019 before texts, emails and mobiles?<\/p>\n 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\u2019d received. Not being overly sentimental and a keen mover of house, I haven\u2019t kept much of my past. No school reports thank goodness (\u2018Georgia tries her hardest\u2019 was the usual damning comment) no Valentine\u2019s cards, no wedding invitations or orders of service. I\u2019m afraid they get thrown, or rather, recycled. The only letter I kept for ages was an invitation to a friend\u2019s Hindu wedding as it was simply the most beautiful thing I\u2019d ever seen \u2013 a symphony of expensive gold and red. Gorgeous. No \u2013 the only sentimental bits of paper I\u2019ve kept are a few love letters written to me by a boyfriend who when, as our college term dates didn\u2019t coincide, had to leave for home before me. He wrote every day. Every day! There\u2019s romance for you. Hard to believe that I could inspire such devotion. But I did. And how did I repay it? Erm … I\u2019m 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\u2019d text but back in the \u201880s (hard for those of Elvi\u2019s 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\u2019m sure they were nondescript but it still gave me a thrill to peer into the \u2018H\u2019 pigeonhole in student halls for the familiar blue envelope.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still a joyous experience to hear that little plopping sound as the post lands on the doormat. There\u2019s 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\u2019s thinking of me. After all, you can\u2019t put a Valentine\u2019s text up on the mantelpiece and gaze longingly at it, can you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Valentine\u2019s Day still has me thinking… … about the lost art of letter writing. It was sparked off by a line in Christina Jones\u2019s book Moonshine. The sixteen year old Elvi is hopelessly lost in first love and can\u2019t text her beloved for fear of having her phone confiscated. How she longs to contact her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,59,58,57],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christina-jones","tag-love-letters","tag-mobile-phones","tag-moonshine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1684,"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/1684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSo although we have these swathes of wonderful gadgets (and I\u2019m as much of a technophile as the rest of you, can\u2019t wait to get my first ipad or whatever they\u2019re called) I wonder if we reserve snail-mail for those really important things?<\/p>\n