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553 words

Hey Reader,

July 3, 1947, So’ton.

I open up the envelope, carefully, because the paper is so delicate.

It’s a letter, from my Grandad’s best friend Jack to my Grandad, Ernest. It concerned the shenanigans Jack wanted to get up to that weekend.

Another letter from Jack, asking, “What are the girls like in So’ton? The girls up here are great sports!”

Grandad would have been maybe 21 or 22 years old, posted on the Eastern Prince, a hospital ship, and back in docks for a few days.

Mum and I were going through a stack of Grandma’s things yesterday and we found treasures — a huge stack of letters, telegrams, and postcards. We’ve not got through a third of them yet, but we’ve already found wonders.

These letters of my Grandad’s…

And also letters and postcards from Mum and her brother David to their parents, from their travels.

My Uncle David went straight from university on a trip around Turkey, Morocco, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, in the early 1970s. He wrote about the coup in Afghanistan and how he didn’t know if they’d be able to cross the border — and how one of the girls couldn’t get a visa in time so had to bypass Afghanistan altogether. He didn’t want my grandparents to worry about him, if they’d seen the news… but there was no need. There was no trouble, no real sign at all that there’d been a coup, because life was carrying on as normal for the normal people, as life often does.

He wrote of the warm welcome in the tea shops in Isfahan, and the wonderful craziness of Istanbul. And the staggering beauty of the mosaic’d mosques in Pakistan and the Taj Mahal in Agra.

As I read, I slipped away, onto the truck on the dusty road through the mountains of the Hindu Kush, and mourned for the demise of letters and camera film.

Because when you have no social media and instant messaging, no unlimited space for photographs, you have to think about what you’re capturing on paper.

One day, maybe 100 years in the future, someone will find your letter and read it with delight because it shows them a little slice of what the world used to be like, unfiltered by publishers or billionaire media conglomorates or performative social media influencer nonsense.

In a world filled with slop — AI and human — about whether a bread roll is called a bap or a batch, take a breath and write a letter.

A real letter, to a real human, about something that matters to you.

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

p.s. If there’s a book you keep meaning to write, whether that’s family stories, a memoir, or something only you know, this is the week to start it.

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