Ink on the page

There is something very personal about writing a letter, an unusual effort in this day and age. A letter is not disposable, endlessly editable, or renewable like the ubiquitous e-letters that amass to form e-mail. A letter has weight, substance and an emotional substrate to all written in it. It's not just ink on a page, but sweat, and mood indicated by the handwriting and the phraseology and the words erased. In short a paper correspondence is a totally different beast. The Quirky Muffin as mailed in physically would be a totally different beast to the one we have now, maybe not better but definitely different. There would be more poems, for one thing, and rather alarmingly.

As Christmas Day wafts by fairly unconcernedly and irrelevantly, I can look back and think about the letters I've written and how they linger. Just today I wrote a Christmas missive for my friend code named Cookie Monster, who lives far far away in a land beyond the closest horizon. Will she enjoy it? Hopefully, but if nothing else she'll love to get the letter itself, assuming it doesn't get eaten by the baby or accidentally thrust into a dark pit by spouses or vengeful cleaners. Oh, the horror of having cleaners for enemies on two separate continents, and only due to a beetroot stain incident in a conference four years ago! You would think that herbalists would be used to such things, but no... You pay, and pay, and pay...

Words are special, as I may have said repeatedly before, but words inscribed by hand on a page are more so. Not just handwritten letters, inscribed with curls of ink carefully addressed to the people that matter in the world, but pencil scratchings in fronts of books explaining gifts and adding emphasis, and journals describing people's innermost thoughts and never intended to see the light of day. Printed books are valuable in a different way, but mass produced and valueless until they're personalised in some way. A handwritten note can elevate a tome's personal value to priceless, while years of ownership can render a volume so recognisably yours as to be irreplaceable, whether it be by accumulated mutilations, annotations, or just those signs of use peculiar to each reader. However that emotional content of the handwritten note, lasting long beyond its author, can be so affecting even in mundanity as to be overwhelming. Some of the best parts of 'Due South' revolve around the entries in Benton's late father's journal, for example, which are either notes to himself or to his son down the line.

It's ironic that I would write this on Christmas Day, when all the greetings cards that have caused the felling of several forests are finally at their destinations with all manner of utterly uninteresting token messages. In my upbringing we never did Christmas, and such things passed me by. Now people get letters instead, a tradition that hopefully will catch on again. A token Christmas card with a ubiquitous message? Never! Several sides of composed and illegible text, well-meaningly crafted but incomprehensible? Yes, all the way! Now, that's more Christmas like, even if you're a non-believer like me!

O.