Things ain’t what they used to be, and it’s hard to imagine a beleaguered institution suffering reputational damage these days sending for filmmakers, a composer and a poet, as did the General Post Office in 1936. Indeed, now it’s the filmmakers who seem to have shone the strongest light on the injustices visited on so many sub-postmasters and covered up for so long. But back in the 1930s, collaboration between a public institution and the creative arts resulted in Night Mail, a short black-and-whitefilm picturing the journey of a postal train from Euston to Aberdeen, set to a score by Benjamin Britten and concluding with a poem by WH Auden, which was painstakingly constructed to mirror the rhythm and speed of the train’s progress. The GPO’s ambition – to portray its service as modern, reliable and vital to the life of the nation, as well as to bolster the morale of its underpaid workers – was largely satisfied.
Auden’s poem – until Four Weddings and a Funeral stopped all the clocks – became perhaps his most quoted, and among its achievements is a keen understanding of what the post meant to its recipients; the daily tombola that might bring the brown envelopes of officialdom but also a love letter, an unexpected card from foreign parts, an invitation to a party. “The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring, / The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, / Clever, stupid, short and long, / The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.”
But the heart’s outpouring and the chatty and catty are now more likely to arrive courtesy of email or WhatsApp, and rarely in handwritten form; the distinction between the institutional and the personal is no longer marked by the process of trailing ink across paper. The Christmas cards we have so recently taken down from mantelpieces and precarious strings may be one of the few times we actually see the handwriting of our friends and family. If, indeed, we do: a charge levelled at the Royal Mail is that it has recently prioritised the delivery of parcels over letters, so our festive greetings may still be lying in a sorting office and arrive in June.
From next year, some GCSE students will have the option to type their answers in exams, and the practice will probably become widespread in the future – an innovation it’s hard to take issue with if it promotes an ease and inclusivity that allows pupils to show best what they have learned.
Might we lose something, though, if we stop scribbling altogether? The wholesale transferral of our lives to the digital realm – to-do lists sitting in our phones, meetings arranged by online diaries, the ceaseless flow of email – seems somehow to flatten our communications, to make everything the same, a mass of indistinguishable life admin. Or perhaps this is just what old people like me think, as we stubbornly jot down notes and reminders to ourselves on frequently mislaid scraps of paper, doodle our unconsciousnesses into being in their margins, strike out our first thoughts, underline our most pressing tasks, give our daily lives expression in our outmoded and increasingly illegible handwriting.
Ingrid Swenson’s wonderful book Shopping Lists: A Consuming Fascination, based on a collection she gathered at a single branch of Waitrose in north London, entertained and informed precisely because of its mundanity. It was a record of individual life, from which we now know that a guest at Jamie’s barmitzvah repurposed their souvenir notepaper to remind themselves that they needed Viakal, Shreddies and possibly – a scrawled question mark suggests some doubt – golden syrup. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the kind of detail that makes me feel glad to be alive.
• Alex Clark is an Observer columnist
