Love...
You may get a Valentine’s Day card this month or at least a text message: luv u :). Which your phone will store for about a week. Or maybe you’ll find a loving email in your inbox - to treasure until your next computer crash.
But do you have any love letters? Any hand-written words of endearment? Correspondence from friends and family?
OK, this is the modern world and a transitory one. We are urged not to print out emails and digital photos to save the planet.
But we are missing out on sensory pleasures: the thrill of seeing the familiar handwriting of a loved one on an envelope, the tactile pleasure of pulling out the letter and smoothing the pages, carrying it to a quiet spot to read.
A friend and I still determinedly correspond by post. We no longer manage the hand-written bit but send real letters for the sheer near-obsolete - pleasure of opening something that is neither bill nor junk mail.
Photographs, too, are now digitally stored on disk or in the ether rather than in boxes in the attic. We are moving into an age when we will leave nothing physical behind, no clues to who we were. Yet, it is only when parents die that children wonder who they were.
Clearing the family home after my parents died I spent hours sifting through old photographs, remembering some, turning others over to see what was written on the back. Often they were unmarked and I have no idea who the people were - but even that mystery is appealing. There were letters and diaries, even old lists - my mother was a hoarder. But it was physical evidence of a life lived and, sitting on the floor surrounded by it, I suspect more comforting than staring at the same details on a screen.
Our delete-in-a-click existence will make the biographers’ task almost impossible. And some of our greatest literature or most fascinating glimpses into the past come from posthumously published letters: Tolstoy’s daily outpourings to his wife and her’s to him or, published last year, the Mitford sisters’ letters. We learn much from the passions of the past - future generations may find little evidence of ours.
...& Politics don’t necessarily make happy bedfellows.
While many a great leader has been sustained by the steady love of an excellent spouse, going doolally whilst actually being a world leader frequently leads to trouble.
Traditionally, it has been the British who are served the fulsome details of politicians’ private lives over breakfast but, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine PM Brown, one month divorced, cavorting with the likes of, say, Nancy Dell’Olio.
“We don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just scream” remarks a French colleague as toute la France is hypnotised by the Sarko-Bruno shenanigans. The man who devoted his entire life to becoming president is now in thrall to a woman who reputedly sends herself to sleep by counting the number of her famous lovers including, of course, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.
Hands up who thinks a middle-aged man who has just started going out with a super model is going to be able to sit at his desk and concentrate deeply on the minutiae of the next G8 summit, say, or third world carbon footprints?
You may get a Valentine’s Day card this month or at least a text message: luv u :). Which your phone will store for about a week. Or maybe you’ll find a loving email in your inbox - to treasure until your next computer crash.
But do you have any love letters? Any hand-written words of endearment? Correspondence from friends and family?
OK, this is the modern world and a transitory one. We are urged not to print out emails and digital photos to save the planet.
But we are missing out on sensory pleasures: the thrill of seeing the familiar handwriting of a loved one on an envelope, the tactile pleasure of pulling out the letter and smoothing the pages, carrying it to a quiet spot to read.
A friend and I still determinedly correspond by post. We no longer manage the hand-written bit but send real letters for the sheer near-obsolete - pleasure of opening something that is neither bill nor junk mail.
Photographs, too, are now digitally stored on disk or in the ether rather than in boxes in the attic. We are moving into an age when we will leave nothing physical behind, no clues to who we were. Yet, it is only when parents die that children wonder who they were.
Clearing the family home after my parents died I spent hours sifting through old photographs, remembering some, turning others over to see what was written on the back. Often they were unmarked and I have no idea who the people were - but even that mystery is appealing. There were letters and diaries, even old lists - my mother was a hoarder. But it was physical evidence of a life lived and, sitting on the floor surrounded by it, I suspect more comforting than staring at the same details on a screen.
Our delete-in-a-click existence will make the biographers’ task almost impossible. And some of our greatest literature or most fascinating glimpses into the past come from posthumously published letters: Tolstoy’s daily outpourings to his wife and her’s to him or, published last year, the Mitford sisters’ letters. We learn much from the passions of the past - future generations may find little evidence of ours.
...& Politics don’t necessarily make happy bedfellows.
While many a great leader has been sustained by the steady love of an excellent spouse, going doolally whilst actually being a world leader frequently leads to trouble.
Traditionally, it has been the British who are served the fulsome details of politicians’ private lives over breakfast but, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine PM Brown, one month divorced, cavorting with the likes of, say, Nancy Dell’Olio.
“We don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just scream” remarks a French colleague as toute la France is hypnotised by the Sarko-Bruno shenanigans. The man who devoted his entire life to becoming president is now in thrall to a woman who reputedly sends herself to sleep by counting the number of her famous lovers including, of course, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.
Hands up who thinks a middle-aged man who has just started going out with a super model is going to be able to sit at his desk and concentrate deeply on the minutiae of the next G8 summit, say, or third world carbon footprints?
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