Last week, I ended up writing about some major changes to a distribution list I run, but I promised to make this week’s entry about writing to a penpal from North Wales. Since last week, I’ve heard my most recent reply arrived safely, despite intermittent postal strikes.
This has also caused me to forget much of what I’ve written. While I meant to make a special point of keeping a copy – as my pal does – I forgot and just posted it without thinking. It’s a small risk, but one of our letters went missing in transit. The more immediate problem with not keeping a copy is that I sometimes have to infer from the response what we were talking about before.
However, we have developed a tradition of asking each other a few questions out of curiosity, in the vein of ‘What friend do you know best?’ or ‘What have you done now that you never would have done ten years ago?’
On to the actual writing, I’m particular about my paper. I keep an A5 notebook with the pages perforated at the spine, so they tear out neatly and fit into a C5 envelope. I admire my pal for being able to write on unlined paper. If I did that, I guarantee the lines would start sloping downwards towards the edge of the page.
Having written so many letters and using that paper so often, I tend to have a rough idea of its length before I write it. Occasionally, it’s shorter than expected, but it sometimes encroach onto eight pages.
And I do write to others as well. The next scheduled letter will be with a Christmas card to my pal in the Republic of Ireland. I don’t exactly go bonkers for Christmas, but this is something we’ve done since the early 2000s, along with birthday cards. If anything, our messages have become longer over this time rather than shorter.
But it’s not a hobby for impatient people. It can take weeks for a reply, and I always have to post early to the Republic of Ireland to help those cards arrive in time.