Communicate the old fashioned way

I love getting post. It happens so little these days: I come home to find a letter gracing my carpet or a package (not an anticipated, self-administered Amazon one) sitting on my table -- to be ripped open immediately.

So I was very happy to arrive home to this package from my grandmother today. It travelled by plane, I presume, over the Irish sea (coming from Belfast, Northern Ireland) and then probably by van to my door (in Edinburgh). There's something about physical transportation that makes the receipt of something more meaningful. 
This week I was writing a paper about the transport of school atlases in the 1900s from mapmakers in Edinburgh to pupils in India. There were significant risks to this. As well as travel taking months there was always the chance that a ship and its cargo would be lost at sea. 



This picture shows the British ship "SS Clan Macmaster" in 1923, carrying cargo, including 3,000 copies of the Oxford University Press' Indian School Atlas, from Glasgow to Calcutta. This ship never reached its destination but was reported "wrecked off the isle of man", and the 3000 copies of the OUP's Indian School Atlas ended up at the bottom of the Irish sea. 



But when school atlases like this one did successfully move from Britain to the farther reaches of the globe, the recipients surely appreciated the physical distance traversed and the obstacles avoided in the process.

The world is becoming less tangible: we all send about fifty texts per day and about the same number of emails, make around seven hundred Facebook comments (am I right?) and maybe fit in a few 'tweets' (I'm for all of these things too). But when is the last time you sat down at a desk, with a hot cup of tea, a pen, or stylus if you're that way inclined, and inscribed a message for a friend or family member that would require some small physical effort, involve material apparatus and lead to physical transport from your door to theirs? If my eighty one year old gran can do it, so can you. 


This package made my day. The moral of this story: send a REAL message to someone soon.