Write on, it seems the love letter is not yet dead

Feb 13 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

EN GARDE, you techno geeks and email aficionados, there’s a battle of words going on and you just might not win.

For the opposition is armed with quill pens for the romantics and biros for the practical and, while they may not seem the most powerful of weapons, remember that a simple man from Stratford conquered the imaginations of centuries of people with a few simple manuscripts.

Letters, it seems, have gone so far down the road of passé that they have turned the corner of retro and come right back round into fashionable again.

If we believe what we are being told by those ethereal beings who know what’s going to be hot and what’s not by a process similar to osmosis, then we will all be writing lavender-scented missives to our loved ones this Valentine’s Day.

Dedicated followers of fads will surely have composed their love letters well in advance. With collection times limited to once in a Labour government defeat, it probably takes the postal service as long to deliver them as it did in the days of rickety mail coaches and wreckers waving lanterns over rocks sea-carved into sharp incisors.

Like organic farming and Cadbury’s Wispas, it’s hard to see why letter writing ever went out of fashion. Sure, emails are much quicker but they hardly have the same personal touch.

You can accidentally delete the most important ones by a bit of reckless mouse motion, and you don’t get the same satisfaction from clicking on delete as you do by building a funeral pyre of notes from the callous ingrate that dumped you.

However, emails are good tools for those who are too shy or emotionally restrained to put their feelings into words. They may be too timid to manage a flirtatious wink over the photocopier, but can summon the strength to type ;) to make a sideways smiley face.

Still, an emoticon, as such combinations of symbols are known, is hardly a fair swap for a declaration of love.

How can a heart made from an “m” with a “v” placed underneath it sum up the same air of devotion as Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”?

Can the symbol :( really compare to the lines “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest” from WH Auden’s Funeral Blues, or even, for that matter, to Barry Manilow’s heartfelt crooning of “I can't smile without you, I can't laugh and I can't sing, I'm finding it hard to do anything.”

But, while I agree with Washington speechwriter Liz Carpenter, who said: “What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can’t reread a phone call.”

There are definitely some sorts of letters that would be improved with easy access to a delete key.

I am referring, of course, to the “round robins” that sometimes appear, particularly at Christmas time, filled with the minutiae of a year’s worth of family life: “Jenny was a bit disappointed about her A-level results but we’re sure she’ll do better in the re-sits”; “Brian has just finished changing the spark plugs on his motor scooter”; “Chelsea has successfully completed Potty Training 101, six months ahead of the average child, and we’re fast tracking her dummy weaning”.

All things that the recipient would know anyway if they were truly good friends with the letter writer, but none of the headline events that would make them turn over the 11th page and keep reading.

No mention, the reader of the round robin notices, of Andrew’s midlife crisis that caused him quit his job at the bank and take up windsurfing, or of the fact that eldest son and Oxbridge graduate Peregrine has been busted for brewing moonshine in the garden shed.

Bryony’s affair with the boss of the local supermarket, who was giving her cut price applewood smoked cheese and Parma ham, and Tinkerbell the Miniature Fox Terrier’s brood of pups to Sebastian the Mongrel From Next Door, have also been neatly skirted over.

All problems that could have been neatly summed up, on an email, with the emoticon :[

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk