If something is worth saying, it should be said properly in a ritual that requires time and effort
from Gloucestershire Lettering Arts to the Cinque Ports Scribes.
It’s not just nostalgia. There’s an instinctive sense of rightness, that if something is worth saying, it should be said properly, that it’s a ritual that requires time and effort. Posting it is part of that – not online, but in a splendid red pillar box, for which we can thank the author Anthony Trollope and his 34 years working at the Post Office. Now there was a man who understood the significance of letters. His novels are full of them, sent and unsent, and there’s a brilliant description in The Eustace Diamonds of a character about to post a letter, knowing it will change his future: “As the envelope slipped through his fingers, he felt that he had now bound himself to his fate.”
Children discover that sense of mystery early, the idea that you drop a letter into the box and then wait for the response. But it never really goes away. There’s magic, as well as uncertainty, in the waiting. Quill London, which runs its own calligraphy workshops, has also started a Letters Club, set up two years ago by Chloe Moore (who still remembers the childhood thrill of being allowed to post her grandmother’s letters in a proper pillar box). “In our digital world,” Chloe says, ‘it’s important to switch off the screen and take time to reflect on what you want to write, rather than dashing off an email and clicking the send button.” And calligraphy slows you down even more, she points out, and grounds you in that sense of focusing on something that matters.
So if you are planning a letter – for Valentine’s Day or any other occasion – take heed from the author Simon Garfield, who collaborated with Royal Mail last year to produce a Modern Guide To Love Letters. First about selecting your writing materials: “A proper pen and high-quality paper will not turn you into Byron or Keats,” he says, “but it might improve your prose by ten per cent.” Then “write from the heart: the whole point of a letter is that it gives you a chance to say things you’re too tongue-tied to say in person.”
Make every word count. And don’t leave them unsent.