Back to pen and paper?

I've got a growing collection of Christmas cards, all of which must have been sent to me in the knowledge that I gave up sending them myself last year.

Readers may remember my utter relief at letting myself off the hook, allowing myself to avoid the needless pressure of working my way through a long Christmas card list.

I felt rather apologetic, even guilty, at the time. It must have seemed very 'Bah, humbug!' to some; evidence of laziness to others - ignoring, or running-away, from a social duty.

It wasn't hard to rationalise the whole thing - personal concern over the colossal waste of high-quality paper; the extra burden on the Post Office when more vital stuff needed to be delivered; and wanting to help along the extinction of a commercial ritual that just imposed an extra task on everyone, at a time when many more useful things might be done to promote the proper spirit of goodwill and good cheer.

All good reasons for not sending cards. But actually, none of them generally thought important. A lot of people wanted to exchange cards, wanted the ritual, wanted to be 'traditional', even though the custom (at least in its modern form) hardly goes back very far in history. Bottom line: sending or giving Christmas cards remains 'part of Christmas', as much as giving Christmas presents does. And although surely everybody can name people (like me) who have stopped the show, and broken the mould, most are going to do the usual thing, the proper thing.

I just hope the people posting all these cards to me, or handing them to me when we meet, fully understand that I'm not going to reciprocate. It's nothing personal; they most certainly have my best and heartiest seasonal wishes; but I'm not going to scribble something brief on a pre-printed piece of paper, and send it to them, just to conform.

What I will do, in certain cases, is send them an email, composed with them especially in mind, decorated with one or more of my own Christmas-themed photos. Putting such a thing together will take a lot longer, and require a lot more thought, than writing a card. My way of being genuine.

But if I need to enclose anything, I can't send an email. It'll have to be an old-fashioned letter in an envelope, with a stamp on it. I had one of these to do earlier today. I enjoyed typing it on my laptop and inserting a picture of a jolly snowman into the text. All I had to do then was plug my photo-printer into the laptop, and print the letter off.

The printer started up fine. The window on the laptop screen said ready to print. The paper was drawn into the printer, the usual whirring noises happened, and out came the result.

Oh dear, that wouldn't do. The print was blurred. I went into diagnostic mode, and got the printer to clean the print nozzles and so on (it was an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 inkjet printer, a top printer in 2007 when I bought it). Hmm, a better result, but still not good enough. More cleaning. This time, an acceptable result, though by no means up to the usual standard. I got out my best pen, signed it 'Lucy XXX' at the bottom, enveloped it with the item to be enclosed, bunged on a first-class stamp, and posted it within the hour.

I probably won't have to print off another letter like that this Christmas. Just as well! I'm now wondering whether my 2007-vintage printer is about to throw in the towel. The problem is surely not so much its age - eleven years - but the fact that it is used so little nowadays. I don't print any photographs with it, only the very occasional letter - just five or six in the last twelve months. It's suffering from lack of use. And in my personal bid to become all-electronic and paperless, it will remain seriously underused. Indeed, I could scrap it now and not notice the difference. And if I did that, and then bought a small, modern, economical printer to replace it, that new printer would also suffer from not being used enough. In the Digital Age, mechanical things gather dust, then gum up and die.

It's all made me think that, if I can't send an email, should I return to pen and paper? To handwritten letters?

It's an idea, isn't it? My handwriting isn't bad. I could justify buying myself a really nice pen, and luxurious stationery. If I needed to take a copy of what I had written, then I would simply photograph the letter with my phone, and file it away on my laptop, in the same way as a typed letter.

A handwritten letter always was somehow more personal than a typed letter, or an email. And in 2018, any letter (as opposed to an email or a phone call) to a commercial organisation, local council or government department needs special handling when received, and probably gets special attention, as if an MP or the Palace had written to one. A pity I can't sign myself Baroness Melford or some such...but hey, you can see how an 'old-fashioned' but impressively-written missive might merit the attention of a manager rather than a minion.

I think the notion of polishing up my pen skills is rather pleasing. Imagine what my shopping lists could look like...