Letter-writing - rediscovering simple joy

When I was a recently-transplanted Pom, back in the mid-1960s, one of the most exciting things ever was the arrival of a letter or a card all the way from England, with Nana or Grandad’s handwriting on the envelope.

As a teenager I had an English penfriend. For years we sent each other monstrous epistles on thin, lightweight airmail paper, sharing our thoughts, our joys and woes and our deepest secrets. My brother Mick and I did the same, packing enormous wads of paper into small envelopes that bulged mightily with closely-written pages and pages of news and secrets. The year that I lived in Japan, the post was a lifeline to home.

The thrill of an envelope hand-addressed to me has stayed with me all my life.

And then came email. How immediate! How exciting! I,fickle creature that I am, and most of my fickle generation, abandoned letter-writing in favour of emails, online chat, sms texts and the biggest letter-writing killer of all – social networking sites. Long, newsy letters to individuals, and the creation of a shared ‘history for two’ have given way to short, pithy status updates or 140-character tweets to an entire network of friends and acquaintances. Intimacy has been sacrificed on the altar of immediacy. It’s sad.

Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE the fact that I can stay in contact with so many people so easily. But staying in touch via a series of generic and impersonal bytes of life isn't the same as the written equivalent of a whispered message in the ear of a friend, meant for them and them alone. Besides, I miss the thrill of seeing my name handwritten on an envelope.

Think about it – when someone writes you a letter, it means that they care enough about you to write something that is just for you; to fold it and address it, attach a stamp to it and take it to a mailing point - each action a ritual of friendship that they have considered worth spending time on. Think for one second about how very special that is!

Every day I put hundreds of postal articles into hundreds of mailboxes. Tragically, the small handwritten envelope is almost extinct. The only things that travel through the post these days (apart from the thousands of parcels - online shopping booty that is killing the retail industry in the same way that online communication is killing letter-writing) are bills, advertising bumf and super-aggressive Readers Digest marketing ‘letters’ masquerading as sweepstake entries. Those are the things keeping the postal system alive – and they suck!

The Readers Digest 'mail' that has cluttered up my letterbox over the last month or so. They must spend a fortune on postage - no wonder their merchandise is so expensive! I'm saving up all my letters, and when I have enough to fill a small box - won't be long now - I will send them back with a nice letter.

 

Here's something to think about:

If everyone in Australia wrote just ONE personal letter a fortnight, the volume of mail would increase a hundredfold, and the joy quotient a thousandfold.

I read Jane Austen’s Lady Susan a while ago, and the epistolary style of the novel made me nostalgic for the shared world of letters between friends. I was inspired to take up letter-writing again, after many years of thumping away at a keyboard, embroiled in e-comms. Oh, what a pleasure it was, constructing sentences in my head and committing them to paper without the middleman of a keyboard with a delete button! But it was nothing compared to the pleasure when, yesterday, during the execution of my mail-sorting duties, I came across a letter addressed to me in my friend Anna’s hand. I collected it from my PO Box at the end of my shift and, quivering, carried it home to read. It made my day – my week, in fact.
 

No email, no pithy text or witty tweet can compare to tucking into the juicy words of a real, hand-written letter that is just for you. I am so glad I rediscovered that joy, and I am so so sorry knowing that so many youngsters will probably never know that joy for themselves.
 

Write a letter to someone today – go on!

Ho Ho Hobart - Happy 50th, Smack!

I've always wanted to visit Tasmania. People make jokes about Tassie all the time, and I've figured out why: they're jealous. The mainland is huge and relatively flat. Tasmania isn't. It's little and it's rugged, and it's very, very pretty. Well, the little bit of it that I saw last weekend was, anyway – and it's whetted my appetite for more.

It's not really a place to go to just for a weekend – but hey, sometimes there are good reasons – and we had one of the best: Smack's surprise 50^th birthday party.

Smack is another motorcyclist and a damned good bloke. He wears t-shirts of questionable taste, and seems to have a lot of motorbikes – mostly Ducatis, but also a single cylinder something-or-other that you have to kickstart. He's a biker from way back, and over the years has collected a lot of biker friends from all over the country. Many of them converged on Hobart last weekend, unbeknown to Smack, to meet up with his Tassie entourage (gee, he knows a lot of people!) and poke fun at his oldness. It was great to catch up with old friends and to make some new ones.

(photo: The Terrible Three meet again - me, Katt & Maggles)

What a hoot! You should've seen Smack's face when he realised the crowd of people at Sublime Pizza were all there to see him. The fact that we'd all just exploded bags of those noisy party poppers and yelled “SURPRISE” should've given it away, but he looked a bit nonplussed, (they say Tasmanians are a bit slow...) then his eyes got bigger and bigger, and he said (in typical Smack style) “You bastards!”

The organisers of the party, a mysterious and very sneaky trio known as Connie and the Stunt Doubles, did a great job of bringing the rag-tag mob together from places far and wide, with a bit of help from a Melbourne bloke called Marty. (thanks, all of you – what a great weekend!)

Now, as my memory is a little hazy, I will have to make things up from this point – although I know we definitely went to Joe's Garage (a bike-themed pub) after eating at Sublime (delicious pizzas!), giving Smack his pressie- a black Shoei helmet so he can do Stig impersonations - and enjoying a delicious ice-cream cake, tastefully decorated with a photo of the birthday boy himself (in yet another tasteless t-shirt!)

(photo: Smack, sneaky daughter Connie and a merry reveller)

The night passed in a blur (although that may have been something to do with copious quantities of Wild Turkey, wine and cider that a certain person consumed). It must've been a great night, because Pisshead and I didn't get back to our accommodation till almost 4am. I'm hoping like mad that there are no CCTV cameras along the Hobart waterfront – although perhaps I could then confirm whether Pisshead's assertion was true. He tells me I 'bumped' into a guardrail on the long stagger home. While I can recall weaving and wobbling, I don't remember any 'bumping' or any guardrails – but something must've caused what felt like a broken hip the next morning!

(photo: Marty & Jules)

There were more pubs on Sunday – there certainly are a lot of pubs in Hobart – before Pisshead and I headed off to the airport, where his reputation was shot to pieces. We met up with Jodz, G-S & Zippy at the airport, and Pisshead actually knocked back the offer of a beer! Too funny! (Actually he was being a responsible citizen - he had a long drive home from Sydney airport.)

I think I need to go back, just to make sure Tassie is in fact as much fun as I thought. Next time on a motorbike, for sure! (and to find out who the mysterious woman is, who is pictured below with Pisshead!)

(photo: Pisshead and evil mystery woman)

The Summer of my Discontent

It's over, hooray! The mornings and evenings have a chill to them; the air is crisper and clearer somehow; the leaves are beginning to turn and there's a scent of autumn on the air. It even rained yesterday!

'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' (thanks, Mr Keats!), autumn is a sort of last-ditch burst of splendour before the deathly chill of winter sets in, (get your leccie blankie on the bed by Anzac Day, folks!) It always makes me feel somehow renewed, though. Optimistic. I'm not a fan of summer in Canberra, and the one that's just finished? Well, quite frankly it sucked.

Of course, it wasn't all bad. Sure, I fell off my bike and had to spend the last 8 weeks in sweat-soaked agonies of immobility and dependence. I got stuck in the bath and grew a chicken-leg. The garden I started working on in late October has spent the last 8 weeks becoming a dessicated wasteland, apart from the weeds, which are thriving, waving their green rude-fingers at me as they try to strangle all the good things I planted. The house has deteriorated from “disorganised” to “disaster-area”, and much of me has followed it downhill, piling on blubber and dimples where no dimples should ever be.

On the other hand, though, I learned how to bottle fruit at Casa del Humble.


A terrific little assembly line, we had – BT's happy fruit recruits, working to transform a wheelbarrow full of peaches to gleaming rows of preserved goodness. Around Australia Day we were rewarded with jars of the fruits of our labours and delicious fruit pie, artfully and patriotically decorated with a little pastry coat of arms, tee hee; a work of art that cracked us all up.


I also learned that it is almost possible to live without my daily motorcycle therapy. Mr & Mrs Humble saw to it that I was not totally deprived, though, and I got to haul my growing butt onto the back of BT's GPZ a couple of times. Being on a motorcycle, even on the back of one, is so beautiful! I couldn't wipe the grin off my face.

So. Summer has come to an end and I am almost walking again, albeit very gingerly. I have an x-ray scheduled for Tuesday, and hope to throw away the moonboot after that. I shall get stuck into some walking to build up my scrawny chicken-leg and get rid of the blubber that has oozed onto my frame everywhere else. Best of all, in a couple of weeks I hope to get back on the Bomber, who has missed me as much as I've missed him, and get out and about for a bit of road therapy.

I love autumn!