Finding new ways to keep in touch...

IJUST received a letter from an old friend who I hadn’t heard from in more than 30 years. He’d sent the letter to our former family home in Kent, which has long since been sold, but the powers of the Royal Mail and the village jungle drums meant it was eventually forwarded on to me here in the South West.

It was a delight to get a proper handwritten letter and reminded me of the fun we had exchanging mail before the days of email and social media back in the 1980s.

My friend started writing to me after he moved from Kent back to his birth home in Penzance, Cornwall.

Our letters weren’t just an exchange of news but an attempt to amuse each other with funny anecdotes and everyday observations – much like those many now share on Facebook or Twitter.

He lived on a farm close to Lamorna Cove in West Cornwall and invited me to visit one summer, promising incredible beaches and views.

After three days of Cornish mizzle I wasn’t convinced but when the mist finally lifted I was overwhelmed by the dramatic scenery and instantly fell in love with Cornwall.

But then my friend moved back to Kent and our letters fizzled out once we could meet up face-to-face.

Shortly after I left Kent myself to pursue a journalism career, which eventually led to a job on the Western Morning News and my own relocation

to Cornwall. It’s now very rare to receive a personal letter via snail mail as most people keep in touch through the power of the internet. While there is much to detest about Facebook, it has allowed many of us to stay in touch with old family and friends in a way that was never possible in the past.

This has been a lifeline for many during 2020.

But the pandemic has also brought me two modern-day pen friends who have brought considerable cheer to my life over the past year.

In an attempt to improve my Spanish, and with little chance of actually going to Spain, I was put in touch with two lovely Spanish people with whom to have a “language exchange”.

We Skype each other once or twice a week and spend half an hour speaking in Spanish and half an hour in English.

While their English is predictably a lot better than my Spanish, it hasn’t taken long for us to settle into the conversations and to find much in common to discuss and to laugh over.

We try to avoid discussing Brexit but have shared our collective horror over Trump’s refusal to concede the election and the subsequent US insurrection.

We chat about holidays, our mutual love of walking, of dogs and of good food.

We also recommend books, films and TV series to watch during the long hours of confinement brought on by the pandemic.

We also help each other acquire new vocabulary in the other’s language with “toque de queda” (curfew) being my latest addition.

Last night’s conversation with one of my friends, a retired psychiatrist, who lives in Santander, was predictably amusing, albeit that we were discussing the serious subject of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effect on people in England and Spain.

She told me that the mutated strain of the coronavirus described here specifically as “Kent Covid” was known to them simply as “la cepa británica” (The British strain) .

After so many years of being unfairly blamed for the Spanish ‘flu, it seems the Spaniards have finally got their own back.

We Skype each other once or twice a week and speak in both Spanish and English

Remember the days of pen and ink on paper?