How Many Letters Do You Write in a Week?
There you are, it turns out I’m not much of a blogger. I haven’t managed to write one since July, and I don’t think that’s the idea at all. You are not being kept up to date with either the minutiae of my existence, or the brilliance of my political and social opinions. Not that I’ve had any of those recently, and my most powerful emotions have been expressed in an ongoing battle with BT about my account, and another ongoing saga about my collapsed living room ceiling which has been repaired but not well, and all of which will have to come down again… You certainly don’t want to hear about that: you’ll have your own stories of being driven half mad by endless correspondence with contact centres and electronic voices.
Most of my time recently has been spent either trying to keep up with emails, or being stressed by not keeping up with them. What is the value, in the end, of email? And why has it become not a useful tool but a source of immense anxiety in most working people’s lives? I have given this some midnight thought, which I will now share with you.
Everyone says, oh, in the old days we wrote letters, how lovely it was to get letters. Sure. But how many letters did you write in a week? Indeed, in a year?
I can get several hundred emails in a week. No-one in their right mind, even a Romantic poet or a prolific Bloomsbury member, attempted to write several hundred letters a week. As a child I managed one pen friend, whose nationality I cannot now remember, never mind her name or a single thing about her. I wrote letters to my mother when I was on holiday at my grandmother’s house; these were short and business like, with details of tadpole development and the wellbeing of hens/cats/dogs, and ending with fond expressions of love for the parents who would shortly fetch me home.
At New Year I wrote the wearisome thankyou letters which ruin Christmas for children, as they attempt to express gratitude for presents they didn’t want in the first place. This was particularly true for my sister and me, I think. We were annually given by great-aunts the dullest present you can possibly imagine for a small girl: a packet of four handkerchiefs. We always knew what this was before we opened it. What else could this flat square box contain? They were embroidered in one corner with nursery rhyme figures, roses and violets, or even lace, but beyond that, their intrinsic excitement did not go. You could not write much of a letter about that.
When there were two or three postal deliveries a day, when you knew the letter sent in the morning would reach the recipient at night or next day, when there was no other way to reach a friend or lover, a writer could send hundreds of letters in a year, from dashed off notes to full blown declarations of love or vitriol. But not several hundred a week, and not to fifty or sixty correspondents. We are asking the impossible of ourselves now. No-one can have so many friends or colleagues, and keep up friendly discourse, or purposeful dialogue with them all.
I think I will give up.
My out of office message, which now says plaintively, Please be patient, there may be some delay in response to your message, will read as follows:
I have decided not to reply to emails after they are a week old. Please phone if you would like to talk to me. Please come and see me if you would like to make decisions with me or plans.
Then I might get some work done. And so might all those poor souls on the other end of the virtual wire.