Tonight is the last day of a 24-day holiday, and whilst I have read lots it took until New Year’s Eve last night that I actually wrote anything more than a few short sentences. Tonight I’ve written some more and taken The Imaginary Wife to the final section. Now I just need to keep up this momentum, and I will be able to launch my third book at the fourth Hawkesbury Upton Literary Festival in April, at which I am due to appear.

I’m going to also try and keep up the routine of writing in these pages – of journaling my life. This is for me, but if you would like to read them also and draw pleasure from reading about my various creativity endeavours then please do. Subscribe if you like. I’m going to be writing, and editing, but I also greatly enjoyed getting back to my art during Inktober so I intend to do more of that to. And I want to attempt to do an illustration for the cover of the new book and will be documenting my attempts here. Should be fun getting back to my gouache paints!

Now, I’m off to look up a bit of Fairy Queen research and Thomas the Rhymer/Tam Lin ballads for that final showdown…

I fired off a quick message to them, half-expecting a bemused of who is this from the new owner of that mobile number… but no, its still Clare! A brief What’s App conversation later and I decide that I need to take the conversation off What’s App and onto email for a proper catchup.

Later that evening, after I successfully got reunited with all my email I sent a long, substantial email of catching up. Then this morning I got an equally long, and full reply. It’s the kind of exchange that I’ve not had with friends since circa 2006/7. Back then, email was the saviour of The Letter, with proper exchanges of content. Since then and the rise and rise of Facebook (and others) we’ve never been in more contact with our friends (or at least our social media enabled friends). The thing is, when you are in such constant contact with so many friends its all too easy to forget the others. And even those who are on social media the exchanges are limited to bitesize messages locked away in a third party online database.

The emails of old, and the example of these two ‘eLetters’ this week, stand as a reminder that only old fashioned email discourse can be where you can read and re-read, offline if necessary, messages of substance between friends and family. Well, email, and actual handwritten letters.

Looking at the average number of emails in my Inbox from the year’s 2001-2006, against 2007-2016, it is an alarming drop. People just don’t send emails anymore, and in exactly the same way that my grandmother bemoaned the loss of letters, I bemoan the loss of emails. The difference is that emails came to replace letters in a way that nothing has replaced the substantive and permanence of either email or letters. It makes me sad.