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.

~ the main reason for working from home was so that I could head out for a lunchtime date with the dentist to have my mouth frozen up for the afternoon and a filling repaired. I took the opportunity to turn up a day early for our veg from Hayley in Bicester Sheep Street and some meat from the butcher in Launton. John The Butcher can sometimes be a bit of a grump but he was on good form this morning. Not sure how we got on to talking about it but apparently for 20 years he lived over the shop in the butchers until he bought a small place in Bicester. He wasn’t sure about it at first but has looked back because he no longer gets people turn up 3 hours after they’ve closed saying, ‘I know you’re shut but you don’t have…’ or once, worse, someone knocking on the door on Christmas Day complaining that their turkey had no giblets and that their Christmas was ruined?!? What the?!!

~ discovered the difference between white and bronze turkeys. Both are free-ranged, and ethically reared, but the White turkeys have the freedom to go in and out of the barn but tend to spend most of their time in the barn, whilst the bronze turkeys get turfed out of the barn in the morning and not allowed back in until evening. Also, apparently the man at Peachcroft is upping his prices a bit too much, and so John has found someone from the same farming association.

~ I also had to stay in this morning for the TV repair man to come out and have a look at the mysterious 1 pixel wide red line running vertically down the screen for a few minutes after first switch on. The engineer came bright and early as we were the first on his call list but sadly the TV was not as cooperative and refused to show said line for the nice man. He’s going to try and get us a new screen anyway though, and in the meantime we have his email address in case it comes back and we can take a picture of it.

~ following my day’s work, spent mostly working on the staff profiles section and the ‘International students’ section of the new School of Education website that I’m working on, I relaxed into Christmas cheer and stirred-up this year’s Christmas cake. Reading back on last year’s entries I see that I made it this weekend last year too.

~ have erected the Christmas tree (awaiting decorating as Emma was out seeing her mum and sister) and made a start on my Christmas cards this evening. As regards cards, I’ve been debating whether or not to do a Christmas letter this year. I have done one ever since 1994, and I think (hope) that it is not one of those awfully showy off, stereotypical one’s, but is instead wryly amusing and suitably self-deprecating. However, do I really need to in these days of facebook and twitter and online journalling. More than ever, our friends know more than they ever have about the minutiae of our daily lives. That said, as I worked out this year’s Christmas card list (rising to 49) there are some who either don’t do facebook, or I know do genuinely do like receiving it, so I think I may do one but with a lower than usual print run.