Ruth Fox's Blog - Posts Tagged "pen-pals"
Communication
When I was ten years old, I fell in love with the idea of having a pen pal. Email didn’t really exist back then – the internet was something I’d heard of only in abstract conversation. We certainly didn’t own a computer at home and those we had at school were hulking white boxes with bulging screens and the processing power of a slice of bread. You weren’t allowed to type on them unless you’d written your work out first. The written word was key.
I had excellent handwriting. I prided myself on my small, neat lettering. And I loved to write – I loved to fill a page with words! I loved ruling up margins and tables. I was probably a very strange child. But when I read about the idea of having a pen pal in a wonderful book called The Haunted Trail, I thought it was the best idea ever. It sounded so romantic, somehow – talking to someone you’d never met, someone from the other side of the world. Plus there was the excitement of getting letters addressed to me in our letterbox. (As I said, I was a strange child.) Apart from my subscription to a kids science magazine, everything that came was for my mum and dad – and they were never happy to receive mail.
It took me until I moved out of home – and got an electricity and gas account, phone account and internet account in my name – to understand this aversion to mail.
But anyway. The science magazine that I had a subscription to ran a little column in the back for people looking for penpals, so I wrote in to them. And, miraculously, a letter arrived for me one day in a pink envelope. Her name was Emily and she lived in Queensland. I don’t remember what we wrote about. I can’t imagine my life was particularly interesting at that stage. But anyway, thinking about it now in this world, where everything has changed, it seems almost bizarre.
It wasn’t that long ago, but the world has changed. Communication is immediate, now. There’s no waiting. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I love it. I can’t imagine how I used to live in a world without home computers and mobile phones. I don’t know how I would do my work these days if I couldn’t email it through as soon as it’s done. Or if I couldn’t look up reference photos for paintings. Or type up my writing, as I am right now, on my laptop. But it’s something we often don’t think about. And I wonder how many kids these days have actual pen pals. I wonder if it’s as exciting to find a new message in your Inbox as it is to find a pink envelope in your letterbox, knowing it’s travelled physically across the country rather than being reduced to pixels and shot off through the ether. I wonder if maybe, in gaining this immediacy of communication, we’ve lost something else.
I had excellent handwriting. I prided myself on my small, neat lettering. And I loved to write – I loved to fill a page with words! I loved ruling up margins and tables. I was probably a very strange child. But when I read about the idea of having a pen pal in a wonderful book called The Haunted Trail, I thought it was the best idea ever. It sounded so romantic, somehow – talking to someone you’d never met, someone from the other side of the world. Plus there was the excitement of getting letters addressed to me in our letterbox. (As I said, I was a strange child.) Apart from my subscription to a kids science magazine, everything that came was for my mum and dad – and they were never happy to receive mail.
It took me until I moved out of home – and got an electricity and gas account, phone account and internet account in my name – to understand this aversion to mail.
But anyway. The science magazine that I had a subscription to ran a little column in the back for people looking for penpals, so I wrote in to them. And, miraculously, a letter arrived for me one day in a pink envelope. Her name was Emily and she lived in Queensland. I don’t remember what we wrote about. I can’t imagine my life was particularly interesting at that stage. But anyway, thinking about it now in this world, where everything has changed, it seems almost bizarre.
It wasn’t that long ago, but the world has changed. Communication is immediate, now. There’s no waiting. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I love it. I can’t imagine how I used to live in a world without home computers and mobile phones. I don’t know how I would do my work these days if I couldn’t email it through as soon as it’s done. Or if I couldn’t look up reference photos for paintings. Or type up my writing, as I am right now, on my laptop. But it’s something we often don’t think about. And I wonder how many kids these days have actual pen pals. I wonder if it’s as exciting to find a new message in your Inbox as it is to find a pink envelope in your letterbox, knowing it’s travelled physically across the country rather than being reduced to pixels and shot off through the ether. I wonder if maybe, in gaining this immediacy of communication, we’ve lost something else.
