Thank you for your letter. I hope we’re not being too esoteric in discussing so much of our correspondence during the years since we both left home. I remember well those long rambling epistles, usually written on the back of a COSHH sheet or a statement of milk deliveries. There were occasions when my letters to you interfered with my diary-writing, because I couldn’t be bothered to repeat all that detail. Perhaps I should just have kept copies.
When you put me at the other end of the spectrum from thanks for the shaving balm, I think you must be forgetting the supplies I used to send when you were based in Poland. I’m thinking particularly of the packet of bayleaves that were mistaken for condoms…
From the moment we both got online at work, the letters dwindled, and now I suppose there’s about one a year, usually just an extended birthday card. Perhaps we should try harder to resurrect the letter. I agree, it was a nice way to write. And then we moved over to instant messenger, which replaced the emails, but was supplemented by weblogs.
My early weblogs were written for an audience of two: your good self, and T. They were rubbish, which disproves your theory about knowing your reader, don’t you think? Before I deleted The Umbrella Stand, I went through it and printed out everything I had written that had any literary merit, which took about six sides of A4 for nearly two years of blogging. Why do you think I have other people write my weblog these days?
As an aside to Lieut. Mothy, I’m not sure how the uborkites will feel about being described as a tabloid. I postulate that, in this internet age, we are all writing at the level of the Sunday Supplement. Not too deep for our freshly truncated attention spans, but we do try to sound intelligent, you know.
Anyway, better get on and do some work,