Better late than never eh? Here’s my #photoadayjuly entry for yesterday.
I’ve always loved writing letters, hell I’ve always loved writing full stop and have wanted to make it my career since I was seven (with a few years off for wanting to be a nun, an airline attendant, and a nurse) and so I have made it so. True, lots of what I write is commercial copywriting or business bollocks but that all changed when I set this blog up in 2009.
Finally, this blog has fulfilled that long held ambition to write and publish, my thoughts and ideas, in my own voice. My own letters to the world, just like Christina Rosetti’s, or Jane Austen’s. With obvious differences in content accepted.
The only sad thing is that I no longer actually write long hand for anything these days, preferring instead to type on my laptop keyboard, and I think that’s a real shame as the actual physical art of crafting letters into words is such a soothing one, the pen is far more an extension of your body and soul than the keyboard will ever be. The only thing I write longhand these days is my own private journal that I’ve been keeping, (more or less every day) since I was ten years old. I leave the handwriting for that cathartic private space, where the ink smudges with tears and the letters are lassooed into words in frantic haste to get the thoughts out and down.
How do we get so much of ourselves onto the keyboard and out into the ether, without our quill drenched in the blood-ink of our emotion?
So I couldn’t find a letter appropriate for this challenge, except this one. This is a letter I’ve kept for its cuteness factor. It lives in my undies drawer along with the little sweater my babies all wore and their birth tags. This is her letter to Santa, addressed carefully:
To Santa
Noth PoLe
Inside, Miss Fliss (then aged eight) has carefully written a list of desired items – 5 Nintendo DS, 4 Bindees, Age of Mythology… She’s even accompanied her list with some drawings of elves and reindeer.
I’m not sure I’ll ever throw it away, and that’s the beauty of the handwritten letter right there.
