The joy of a letter can’t be stamped out by email

SO efficient was the Royal Mail in Dublin before the Easter Rising that a clerk in the General Post Office would, mid-morning each weekday, send a letter to his wife in the suburbs indicating his preference for dinner, confident it would arrive in time.

The man who told me that delicious anecdote is now dead, cut down by cancer at 57.

When I heard of his Stage IV diagnosis – there is no stage V – I wrote him a letter.

It was, in part, cowardice. Starting a phone conversation: ‘I’ve heard you’re dying…’ was likely to end with me – if not him – in tears.

So I set to. My handwriting, maimed by years of shorthand and hunt-andpeck typing, looked like a chicken had skittered over the Basildon Bond and I used black ink, because of my odd aversion to blue.

Writing gave me the chance to marshal my thoughts, making sure I got down every aching emotion.

I paid tribute to the dying raconteur’s vast capacity for skilful work, matched only by his ability to sink pints of plain in a pub near where we’d worked for the Mail in Dublin.

I talked of the humanity just beneath the surface of his journalist’s cynical carapace.

I paid tribute to his generosity of spirit; swore to remember his adage that anyone who uses the cod music-hall phrase ‘the Emerald Isle’ knows nothing of Ireland.

I still have his reply, which begins: ‘How lovely to receive a letter – an actual letter!’

A face-to-face meeting would have been best, but time (short) and distance (long) precluded that.

Yet our little exchange vanquished any email or text, the cheap currency of communication in a world where letters are a lost echo from what my children dismiss as ‘ancient Egypt’ – my youth.

Somewhere I have a Morland & Co cigarette box (James Bond smoked their Balkan blend in Ian Fleming’s 007 books).

My late maternal grandparents never smoked, so it contained postcards they were sent by friends and family over decades.

They are from 1960s Puerto Pollensa and Dubrovnik, plus ones from sedate British resorts.

There’s one from me of New Cumnock’s open-air pool in glorious monochrome, sent from a Boys’ Brigade summer camp. Naturally, my message is in black ballpoint.

Just as letters have waned, so postcards (I once sent one from Sicily to a boss. It showed Etna in eruption and the message was: ‘Wish you were here!’) are fading like a folk memory.

THESE days it’s all Instagram and Facecrook and selfies transmitted at light-speed via the internet and I mourn the loss of a gentler medium. Getting a letter or a postcard (even weeks after the holidaymakers’ return) was special.

Now the postman delivers only junk mail – gaudy leaflets for frozen food or plastic soffits – charity begging letters and bills, bills, bills.

I admire the pluck of the villagers of Altnabreac, Caithness, who have fought to restore Royal Mail deliveries.

They faced a 42-mile round trip to collect their post when Royal Mail deployed the health and safety excuse to cut them off.

The glory days of letters and cards are gone and the mail boat has sailed…

But I do hope someone somewhere is still sending the odd postcard or letter – an actual letter – to Altnabreac.