World Letter Writing Day.

 National World Letter Writing Day.

In a world where modern technology becomes more dynamic by the day and mass communication has almost been taken for granted, some of us may have forgotten the traditional methods, the old school approach, the way it used to be way back in the past and now no longer is. To some extent, nothing of  in the way of a dramatic transformation has taken place. It just seems as if it has and we'd taken our eye off the ball. 

Today is National World Letter Writing Day. There you are, it's been said and, for those of a nostalgic turn, this celebration of the written word has to be regarded with a wistful longing for pen, pencil, ink blotters, sheets of A4 paper by the ream load and plenty to say for yourself. Let's face it, the days of letter writing have been more or less consigned to history. There may well be a small corner of Middle England or suburbia where computers have yet to be embraced, nobody has a Nokia mobile phone and a Tablet is something you probably take when you're unwell. But this is the present day and the foreseeable future.

The fact is that some of us still yearn for the day when sitting down at your davenport desk of the richest mahogany and carefully assembling your thoughts for a letter to whomsoever, was something we'd love to do one more time. Because nowadays nobody writes letters if they can possibly help it since there's something called the Internet and the World Wide Web and we e-mail our families, friends and colleagues.

We click onto the Outlook page of our PC, start tapping furiously away on our keyboard and then remember that an e-mail address has to be negotiated. Simple, really. But what could be further from the truth. Firstly you've got to go through the whole tiresome rigmarole of making sure that all the requisite dots in the address are present and correct. Then you have to ensure that the address itself is the right one otherwise you may be sanctioned by your computer for misleading information. Suddenly, the letter you've sent sends the message back to you as invalid and lost in cyberspace. 

By the end of your e-mail your friendly PC may ask you whether you're completely satisfied that what you've already written has been spelt grammatically right or is just completely wrong. And yet, you're convinced that you've carried out the procedure and why on earth should you want to change something that makes perfect sense? There's something wrong with Outlook but we just rolled with the punches and got on with the business of expressing ourselves with the medium available to us and tried to forget everything we'd been told as children. We were now in the high tech age.

Now the chances are that most of us can remember when letter writing was a well organised operation that was both enjoyable and extremely satisfying. We've been writing letters since time immemorial and Dickens was a boy in shorts. Dickens didn't have to agonise about the hacking of Facebook accounts or sorting through the complexities of X or Twitter or increasing his number of friends on Snapchat or Instagram. It was so much easier for one of the greatest Victorian story tellers. But who knew back then?

His day would have consisted of a leisurely breakfast before retiring to his peaceful study. He would pick up his quill and pen thousands of words, sentences and paragraphs, hunching over his bureau and then sighing with irritation and obvious impatience. There had to be a simpler way of transmitting his thought processes in a quicker, smoother and much less time consuming fashion. Besides, chapters of his books seemed to be taking whole months and were just a painstaking ordeal. There had to be something that would be labour saving, convenient and altogether more comfortable.

But what happened if, in the act of committing words to a paper with a fountain pen, you accidentally used the wrong choice of words or got in a muddle over the construction of a letter. Perhaps it should have been phrased differently or more appropriately. And then we fell into the trap. You scratched your head, acknowledged your mistake in a state of high agitation, screwed up thousands of pieces of paper, chucked the missive in the bin and started over and over again. How infuriating? So you crossed out the offending words and then drew through the erroneously written words before scrunching up another piece of paper. This would happen over and over again and nobody batted an eye lid because computers were over a hundred years away from reaching our homes, schools and offices.

Now though letter writing is just some obsolete art form that used to make sense and was intelligible. It was the accepted norm. In the world of newspapers, some letters were rewarded with a couple of shillings in the old days or maybe a £150 if it was a competition. Agony aunts such as the Daily Mirror's formidable Marj Proops must have accumulated huge sacks of mail with letters from boy and girl friends, aunties and uncles, cousins and nephews worried about the state of the nation. Then there was Disgusted from Dover who would invariably air their impassioned grievances about loose morals and dubious programmes they'd seen the previous night on the TV.

So we'd finish our lengthy letter to the highest authorities whether it be council related or your friendly politician or some influential money expert. Then we'd start complaining about the iniquities of the  tax system or the vastly confusing benefits that we should be entitled to. But a certain generation relied exclusively on letter writing because it was our only way of making us feel understood by the rest of the population. 

Then the said letter would be dropped into the nearest red pillar post box and we'd breathe a sigh of relief because it was relevant and effective. What we were expecting was a prompt dispatch so that birthday cards would get to a relative on the day of your birthday. But we still love the postman or woman and we wouldn't have it any other way. There is still something comforting about letter writing because it just feels like the personal touch rather than the informal way of the old days. You could take your time over the kind of words you want to write and a letter is so much more rewarding. 

Most of us knew that the name and address of a letter would normally be found at the top of the page  with the date below. Then the words would spill out lovingly and meaningfully and who cared if words had to be rubbed out by pencil or just smudged out with blue ink? There was a brown manilla envelope next to you so you folded the said letter and tucked it into the envelope safe in the knowledge that the letter had found a safe home.

Then there were the endless letters sent to our bank manager which smacked of formality. Now here was an opportunity to tell your bank manger exactly how you felt about them. Since when did you go to into overdraft and owe money to a company you'd absolutely no knowledge of? But the bank manager was a figure of respectability and solid integrity so they were not to be argued with. Perhaps they'd give you the benefit of the doubt and all would be swiftly forgotten once the bills had been paid and everything was hunky dory.

So there you are Ladies and Gentlemen. It's National Letter Writing Day. It was the day we once connected with a perfect stranger on a childhood holiday to Spain with your late and wonderful mum and dad.  They called it pen friends or somebody you felt a common affinity with at the time. And so we chatted and discussed our passion for football at the time. He was a Manchester City fan if memory serves me correctly and you were a claret and blue West Ham supporter which, in the light of yesterday's events in the Premier League match between the two teams, seems almost ironic. But then there was nothing ironic about the result because some of us would have been childishly sulking or maybe not. It was, after all, just a game.

For a while my pen friend Terry from Manchester were, quite literally on the same page, exchanging latest developments in our adolescent lives. And then one day you'd come to the realisation that neither of us had anything in common with each other. You can remember needing at least five or six pieces of A4 paper to scribble so much information onto one side that some of the words were just colliding into each other. You were now rapidly running out of lines and everything had to be squeezed into a confined space. But then it occurred to you that both Terry and yours truly lived completely different lives, came from hugely contrasting backgrounds and, besides, you'd completely run out of paper.

We all know that distinguished authors are men or women of letters, learned scholars and university lecturers. Letters had a palpable air of seriousness about them, businesslike in their execution. You deliberate and consider every word or letter without worrying whether you've hit the wrong letter on your keyboard and found, much to your horror, that the whole process has been wiped into obscurity, never to be retrieved and lost forever. May we should cherish letter writing as something of a fundamental means of expression. Whatever you do though, don't forget to stick  a stamp on the corner of your letter because without it, that letter is going nowhere. Happy Letter Writing Day everybody.