Ultimate tonic- compose yourself

There’s a moment in The Correspondent, Virginia Evans’s novel told entirely through letters, where Sybil, seventy-three and gloriously particular, explains that her letters are follow-ups to phone calls, or written in lieu of them, so she can compose her thoughts properly. I’ve just finished this book- and it got me properly into the old school nature of letter writing. The letter as the place you finally say it right…. Or maybe that’s just too much pressure?! A card, a poem?!

Last day vibes

It landed harder because of the week I’ve had. I left Ottolenghi - three years and a bit - and when I thought about how to communicate how much that group of brilliant misfits meant to me, I sat down with Maud and we made a card for every single person on the team. Not a group email with a gif. If you want someone to know you meant it, specifically, about them, you write it down. ❤️

And then they went and out-did me. My team wrote me an ode (well we do have an in house genius writer!). Five rhyming verses, since read roughly forty times, tears and smiles. Someone had to sit down and find a way to rhyme “Shona” with “phone her,” and the effort - the sheer, deliberate slowness of it- is the whole gift. I will be framing it.

Im ruddy here for it all. I’m the one who makes everyone do Christmas cards by hand, to mounting complaint. Who makes the children write to their teachers at the end of term. Who marches them through a holiday journal every summer - daughter adores it, son sticks in leaflets and left over ticket stubs but hey that’s fine. The kids and I kept Happy Self journals going for months, too - three good things a night, that sort of thing. And I cannot pass the stationery aisle of a French supermarket without picking out a new pen or some notebooks with gridded (is that a word?!) paper. It sounds worthy, written down. Possibly it is.

At the end of the Correspondent, the author poses some suggestions for questions for book clubs… love this idea in the back of a novel. One is ‘what value do you see in these older forms of communicating?’…..

The irony, of course, is that I read books on a Kindle, and I’m now typing it into your inbox on my way to go and work at Substack! But I think it’s the closest the internet has come to a letter- long, personal, chosen, sent from one human to another who wanted to hear from them. Which, given the week, feels like the right bet.

Write summat to someone (or yourself!) it’s the best tonic. ❤️