Words Said and Written
Words never really took off for me on paper until recently! I don’t mean, folding an A4 into a paper aeroplane and attempting to cross the Channel on it. I mean, I’ve never really given myself credit for the written words that, over the years, have underpinned all my career choices (University) and been the subject of many a witty greeting in the plethora of cards sent to loved ones over the years. As a bit of a hoarder, I have kept letters, cards and missives from decades passed, from pen pals, and family. I had so many of them I decided to laminate and arrange them into a folder of memories.
It has been cathartic reading through them, with the aged eyes of a fifty-year-old, reminiscing the teenage and early adult humour that punctuated the letters sent and received between my sisters, friends and I. As a bit of an artist and a “lefty” I am a dab hand at diagrams, and most of these letters are decorated with characters of famous people we once ridiculed, Jean Claude Van Damne, David Hastlehoff, Deirdre Barlow, to name but a few.
Some of the letters came to my Stoke Mandeville address where I started my nursing career in 1995, living in the nursing quarters, my first time away from home at the age of twenty. There is such sentimentality in those letters from my sisters, detailing events at the time, that we have long since forgotten. There are also letters that have no meaning at all, silliness and fabricated stories, designed only for laughter. These are all protected in the laminated envelopes forever protected against further wear and tear.
This folder will remain a reminder to me, of the creative talent my siblings and I all seem to have, a flare for putting words onto paper, bringing to life otherwise mundane subjects, raising the roof off with laughter, all the while, coping with the demands that life in those younger years brought. Some of the art and stories can never see the light of day! We now live in a very different world, where the humour of the nineties, would not stand up to the woke society we now exist in. Cancelled would be stamped permanently on the folder, erasing decades of laughter.
I received a beautiful and thoughtful gift from one of my closest friends on my 50th birthday, timed so perfectly with my new and developing website, where my writing skills have been brought back to life. She brought all the birthday cards I had sent her since and including the age of 16, where I sign off: “lots of muesli, Grace”. I was on a diet at this age, where all I ate was this cereal, I have mentioned this in my memoir, and my friend brought written evidence! Even then, I treated some of the darker battles of my life with humour, unaware of the damaging effects of an eating disorder.
Subsequent birthday cards seemed to get more ridiculous as the years passed, but each one showed the flare I have for words, anecdotes, one liners. In some of these cards I have drawn cartoon versions of the people in our circles at the time, or made reference to a night out we were looking forward to. Like me, my friend holds on to keep sakes, and I am forever grateful that she kept these cards. I wonder, in another fifty years, humour will come full circle and I will be able to publish a new book called “Missives of Memories, and other diagrams”. Here’s hoping!
