Letters

Letters have disappeared, only twitchy ones from banks, credit card companies, government departments. The concept of writing to your child seems as obscure as calling in the soothsayer. But I'm starting a [one way] correspondance with my son Adam. He is 19 and travelling round the world with Doug, also 19. Currently they are in India, specifically Amritsar. In the 18th Century, there was a minor literary fashion for books of worldy advice and moral improvement -

Lord Grimefuddle's Advice to Young Gentlemen Abroad - avoid the whores in Venice for they do steal your purse

It was an excuse to waffle on with no chance of a reply. Technology creates holes in patterns of communication; brevity, codes, jokes are structural not decorative. An entire system limiting message to 164 characters seems a logical stopping off point on the way to being hard wired with a USB port between your eyes. But still, letters are part of my culture.

Dear Adam I found this text last night on ffffound :

'Dis a ma fille que je fais voyage' - 'Tell my daughter I'm going on a journey'.

It summed up the father and child relationship, the distance and hurt of leaving. But also the possibility that a child is relieved by the absence of one parent which gives them all of the other one. I think about this from my own wandering while you were growing up, the preparing and the return which usually brought out the worst in me. Calling long distance seems to be a vice. It loads everything into a few minutes in a sweaty phone box or dusty PCO or cracked mobile. Interpretation breaks down but we try to gather enough information to understand what's happening or not. I remember being ill in Pakistan and hearing your voice - a genuine hallucination - saying 'Hi Dad!' - and telling Jill about it and I couldn't get it across. A simple mis hearing was a message from you. The messages sent and received seem like that, an accident in a distant place from which try to work out everything. Not just distance or mildly displaced time, but the difficultly of saying what one wants and what others need to hear. love Dad x