Letters - yours, mine, other people's...

I was mortified recently finding out I had accidentally mixed up letters: one was sent to France but should have gone to Canada, and vice versa. This is a very rare mistake for me and in over 10 years of penpalling, have never mixed up letters to penpals before.

I do not know if the recipients read much of the wrong letters before forwarding them on. They knew of each other anyway, and have exchanged letters before, I believe. The contents of my two mixed up letters were not 'Top Secret' or "For Your Eyes Only" nor were they overly personal nor suggestive in nature. Some letters I do write to close penpals may contain more personal information, not just about me and my family, but questions / comments regarding theirs. I may occasionally talk about other penpals in letters: one recent case is that to a penpal in the UK with family & penpals in Hong Kong - I also have a penpal there so we have written about the political situation. I hope things will work out for the best over there.

I have not finished reading More Letters of Note, yet. I really should. I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of letters compiled by Shaun Usher. It was interesting to spy on written conversations not initially meant for strangers' eyes; a glimpse into the lives/worlds of other people. Do we all like to eavesdrop to a certain extent?

I would have liked to have read the letters my mother's brother wrote to her, in a 40 year correspondence, but she had shredded most of them. I was hoping to find insight into some family history, although I am not all that interested in genealogy (in a time my mother's family did not approve of my father, and possibly some of her ancestors would turn in their graves about it).

So, what of my letters, the ones I have received? I keep them all. I do sometimes look back through them, but not often. Should I digitise them? Have OCR work its magic and make the letters searchable? Should I allow others to read them?

Occasional snippets do get shown to others - maybe on a particular topic of interest to my family or friends (e.g. I showed the picture of a boat a penpal had sent me, to a friend who was a sailor and merchant seaman), or maybe the handwriting. But, I do not show the bits I deem to be "For My Eyes Only" to anyone else.

But, what should happen to my letters when I die? At this time, I don't think I would want them to be destroyed. The letters are kept in their envelopes. If an envelope has a return address other than a PO Box, I don't think it would be fair to sell the envelopes as stamped covers. The stamps could be removed from the envelopes and sent on to charities raising money through kiloware, or to friends/family who are interested in stamp collecting.

But what of the letters themselves? What it matter if they were read after I died? Would it be up to my family what to do with them? Do I bequeath them in a will? Should I leave it up to my family to decide? Would the senders like them back?

As for letters I have sent, I am not sure I would want them returned to me. I relinquished any power over them when I fed them to the post box. They belong to the people I sent them to, and leave it to them to decide what to do with them.

April has been #sow_on rather than #write_on

February is long gone, but I have some letters written to me in February still to reply to. For most of February and all of March, I was away from home. I received a couple of batches of letters to keep me going, but returned home to even more letters! The better weather means there are other calls on my time, namely gardening. I have been busy sowing seeds, digging up weeds, talking to bees and ladybirds and spiders and woodlice...

February itself was a success. I surprised lots of people on the InCoWriMo-2019 website, and was also surprised to receive over a third of replies to those letters.

One slight dilemma I have is that I have no idea of the order the letters arrived in while I was away. I could take educated guess from the postmark (if any), and letter date (if any) as I have a good idea of roughly how long a letter takes to get to me. However, I think I might just do pot luck, see how I feel.

I had a huge pile of letters I replied to for filing away. My current storage solution is to store the letters from one person in one (or more) plastic bags. Not all that romantic. Maybe I could find some fabric and use ribbon or thicker threads to wrap them up.

I have contemplated scanning in the letters received. I did scan in a few from my teenage years but wonder and ponder what file format and folder system to use. How future-proof would these digitised letters be?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I have been away a couple of times helping my mother. I came across a few things while there. The town I live in had a charity shop for Tenovus but I had never heard of it before then. I didn't realise that it was a well established charity, even featuring as a slogan postmark in 1968. 

My mother was a letter writer to friends and family, in the UK as well as overseas (mainly Australia). The letters have been mostly shredded but she kept the stamps on paper. I brought back this many with me. 

My dad liked covers, including first day covers. This is one I have of his - the inauguration of the car ferry between Southampton and Le Havre - 19th July 1964. I don't think I have taken this particular crossing across the Channel, but haven been sailings from Folkestone, Dover and Ramsgate, arriving at Oostende, Zeebrugge, Calais and Boulogne (not respectively). 

He also had penpals (like father like daughter, eh!). I don't know what happened to the letter inside (shredded, perhaps). I looked up the sender's name and discovered an online obituary. This person's special interests had included corresponding with pen pals all over the world!! That sounds like me! I think I would like that in my obituary! 

 So, what have I been doing recently? I have been buying even more stationery. I bought quite a few earlier this year from Paperchase in the sale. I like the jolly and cheerful designs. The main complaint though is that the paper allows you to only write on one side of the sheet, but sometimes that is a good thing as the designs will hide your writing and it won't show through cheap white envelopes. 

This was bought at Birmingham New Street station's Paperchase last month (I was travelling by train - and yes, I did take the opportunity to get some letters written on the train). However, I wouldn't be able to use scented stickers on letters to every penpal (some have allergies & intolerances I wouldn't want to exacerbate).

Old letters

My mother had shredded the letters she had received, but she found the letters I received as a teenager in the late 1980s, some via the International Youth Service (now closed down), and some from schoolfriends who moved away before the rest of us finished our schooling. I wonder what happened to Li Pin in Singapore, Ester in Jülich/Germany, Frederic in Toulouse/France, and Julie in Rouyn-Noranda/Canada. I hope they are all well. I think it may have been me who stopped writing.... I have their letters in front of me.... perhaps if I am curious enough, I could send something to the address they used back then..... maybe I'd hear something back from them.....

May Stats:

Postcards. In - 28, out - 20
Letters. In - 16, out - 14 plus 4 surprises
Birthday cards. Out - 2
Packages - 1 in, 1 out.