a is for awesome, b is for badass - l

I love letters.

I’ve always been very excited about the post. Perhaps it’s due to the many hours I spent watching Postman Pat in my early years. That adorable fellow in the red van, delivering the letters with his faithful cat, Jess, is a pretty good poster boy for the Royal Mail. I actually loved Postman Pat so much that I had a toy black and white cat, which I named Jess, after Pat’s estimable pet. This was a great honour, although it also probably had a little to do with my inability to name my toys at all creatively.

I loved Jess, and I took her everywhere. She was one awesome toy cat. Then one day I left her behind at a hotel… and they sent her back to me in the post! The awesomeness involved in turning a sad, sad story, into a joyful reunion between a child and her favourite toy, involving a parcel from a hotel of all things, is almost too much to conceive of.

When you’re little the post is very exciting, and everyone seems to get letters all the time, except you. then you grow up and realise that they’re all bills and depressing bank statements, and the post office has queues like it’s a theme park, and the theme is incompetence.

But every so often you get a letter, and that’s just the best thing ever. It’s like getting a present, because you open it. And sometimes there is a present inside – sometimes it is some hilarious newspaper clippings or a tiny bar of chocolate.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the internet, or if you just fell asleep on your keyboard and somehow ended up here, assuming it was a strange Microsoft Office wizard… but you’re online right now. Being online is great because you can do things like read hilarious blogs and look up how to cook corn on the cob when you’ve never done it before. Plus, there’s email. Email is brilliant for work – perhaps too brilliant, sometimes you look at your inbox and just want to scream “stop the madness” over and over.

It’s also great for keeping in touch with people on the other side of the Atlantic, especially since you can get it on your phone so it’s like they can text you. Skype lets you call people for cheap, and face Skype is free and comes with faces. And facebook lets your Younger Sister post videos on your page daily, so you don’t forget what music or hilarity is. But even though there are about a million and ten ways to keep in touch, letters are still exciting. This is due to their extreme awesomeness.

The paper helps – airmail paper is good, or writing on the back of your hilarious correspondence from various university departments (with your own annotations) is pretty great, as well as being good for the environment. Even if the paper is just normal, the little pictures all truly awesome people include are purpose built to make my day.

But the fun doesn’t stop with receiving letters, because I also like writing them. I often feel a sense of inferiority about my own letters, because I already know everything that I put in them. Other people’s letters are a lot more interesting to me, so I hope it works the other way round. If it doesn’t my letters are probably quite dull, which would be a shame because letters should be awesome.

And now to the reason we’re here – you fell asleep on your keyboard or something, but the stuff that you’re reading with that perplexed look on your face is here because sometimes I think things. But the reason it looks like this is that one of the things that I thought once, was that the letters one particularly awesome person sends me, are made even more awesome because of his illustrations. So I started putting little drawings in my letters, too, and then I thought I’d put some here.

All because of letters. Because letters are awesome.