Thank you (notes)

One of the many things we don’t do in the modern world any more (or at least I don’t do and haven’t for many years) is write thank you notes.

When I was a child this was an awful chore.  I would get quite a number of birthday and Christmas presents from relatives, and each and every one of them had to have a reply written by me.  This started about the age of seven when I could write well enough to do it and there was a ritual associated with it.  Two days after the event, my Dad would sit me down at the kitchen table with pre-lined writing paper and the fountain pen I had just graduated to, and I would laboriously copy one full page of text for each relative.  They couldn’t be exactly the same for each because they had to reference the specific present, and also mention the family of the recipient etc.  As far as I remember my Dad generally ended up dictating them to me.  It was an awful boring business – along the same lines of having to spend 15 minutes a day doing music practice.

A little later, every year for Christmas I would get at least one box of “notelets” and write my thank yous on these – very important to make sure the giver of the notelets got a reply written on their corresponding card.

And then the habit of physical notes died away, replaced first by email which seems to have died in its turn, and now by texts and WhatsApp.

But not so for some of the people at the church I (and sometimes J) go to.  For the tea we hosted the other week I got multiple thank you notes, all written on lovely cards.  And you know what – this is a lot nicer than random emails or (god forbid) text messages.  They are a pleasure to look at, and the writers had obviously gone to trouble to chose suitable things to say.  I liked getting these – a little graceful touch which I thought had gone from the world.