REAL POST

Rather funkily I got some proper post recently. Not a bill, not junk mail and not another of my stupid so-called bargains, but genuine, unexpected and proper, genuine, actual post and, do you know, it rather made my day.

It came from out of the blue, you see. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, from my limited circle of actual, genuine human friends and acquaintances, ever sends me anything via the Royal Mail any more that I wasn’t really already expecting. I get a few birthday cards and Christmas cards like anyone else, but the senders and the numbers are always pretty much a known quantity before even one envelope has been sealed or one bauble dangled in a supermarket.

Most of my limited personal contact with the great big wide old world comes through emails and the occasional telephone call and through the comments section on the increasingly unloved postings in Lesser Blogfordshire. I look into cellphone tariffs and remained highly amused that anyone would think me capable of sending 1000 texts in any given calendar month and it’s rather laughable that I could even find enough to say on the phone whilst I was roaming around and about that could ever add up to 600 minutes a month.

I am not, after all, a businessman and, let’s be perfectly frank here, I don’t know that many people and those I do know I will either speak to in person or ring them up from home.

Anyway, for any and all of those reasons, getting an unexpected communication delivered through the door was suddenly one of those tiny miracles of life that can make your day when it happens to you, more especially if you happen to be me.

So, what was it? I hear you ask, although I’m not sure I want to tell you. Happily enough, the recycled and home-fashioned envelope made up from some Amazon parcel packaging is currently sitting right beside me and, unless the security services have taken the unlikely step of putting spy cameras in my unthreatening little dwelling place, it is unlikely that any unscrupulous journalist will be able to hack into the contents and reveal what was being sent to me to the wider public at large.

Ha! Hah! Take that you foul denizens of the Fourth Estate! You can’t peek into my private communications without doing something even more illegal than you usually would!

That’ll teach them.

So have they gone now? It’s just you and me now is it? All right then…

I got sent a rather impressive collection of cartoon images and witty poetry created by a dear and much valued friend of mine who’s been having rather a rough time of things over a number of years, and they were all rather brilliant, if you ask me. Granted, my opinion is seldom worth much to anyone, but I rather enjoyed the few minutes it took me to look through them and laugh out loud along with them, and, whilst I also felt a little sad at both the loss to the world that their inability to produce much work over the years has meant, and the realisation it also brought home about my own limited talent in comparison, I can’t remember receiving a happier piece of mail in a long, long time.

Sometimes I think it’s so unfortunate that we’ve allowed the personal touch to slip out of so many of our communications in recent times, so, go on. Make someone’s day and write them a letter.

I know I won’t…

But then you knew that anyway, didn’t you, and it really shouldn’t stop you from doing it. After all, if you’re doing the opposite of whatever I’m doing, then you’re probably getting something right…