…my good pal, Karen Soutar, remarked on my commentary feed the other day about the lamentable lack of proper pen-pal-ism… and it triggered a wee memory throwback for this ol’ Jurassic… I just wonder for how many more of yeez out there it would have the same reaction?… my guess is if yeez are under, let’s say 40 years old, the whole pen-pal with real paper and handwriting gig possibly passed yeez by… p’raps one of the downsides of the universal ease of access to computers and the internet… the same thing applies, I’m sure, to philately (postage-stamp collecting, Mabel)… I well recall, living as we did in Docklands Govan in Glasgow, the fascination and wonderment at being able to send letters squillions of miles away across the oceans to newly-found correspondents… for some of us, seldom if ever having travelled further than three streets away from where we lived, it was akin to communicating with another planet… I recollect at least a couple of pen-pals… the more prominent of these, for reasons which will become apparent as yeez read on, was a young lady in Filadelfya in ‘Merika, whose handwriting was the most wondrous art form I had seen up until then, with that peculiar (peculiar to we Scots, anyway) cursive penmanship, full of loops and whirly bits, and that funny way of joining up lettering for the letter ‘r’, with the front stem seemingly forgotten… she must have been all of nine years old, me the same (my, my, yeez do have a great memory Master Gallacher, going back that far)…
…the black and white photographs of herself were the surrogate for my first pin-ups (forerunner to ‘selfies’?)… and of course, because she was a GURL, the Celt in my young veins was immediately LUV-stricken… six weeks between postal exchanges was common, and only served to heighten the delicious anticipation of the next missive… it’s not recorded anywhere whether my puppy-ish adoration was reciprocated, but several of the envelopes were adorned with tiny wee hearts, and on one glorious occasion, I could smell some perfume… alas, this budding intercontinental romance faded as stuff took over… stuff like football, and stuff like school exams, and let’s face it, even back then, stuff like the prohibitive cost of postage stamps for a wee Govan boy… her name has long since faded from my wee grey cells, but this ol’ Romeo wonders what ever happened to that first long-distance Juliet?… ah well, back to the immediacy of the internet… but I do miss them days, don’t yeez sum’times feel the same way?… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
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