Penpals

R

Rose65

Well-known Member
Location
United Kingdom
Remember as a child being encouraged to have penpals from other countries? That wonderful feeling of receiving actually handwritten letters. Sitting down to write with your best fountain pen and Basildon Bond stationery - my favourite. I loved and miss old fashioned letters.
Are we not losing something in these days of instant communication? It's like birthday cards, a text just isn't the same really.
So did you ever have a great penpal abroad and did you ever meet? I didn't, but a friend of mine wrote for 40 years to a friend in France, they grew up, brought up families. Then in later life they met and it was amazingly good.
 

Rose65 said:
Remember as a child being encouraged to have penpals from other countries? That wonderful feeling of receiving actually handwritten letters. Sitting down to write with your best fountain pen and Basildon Bond stationery - my favourite. I loved and miss old fashioned letters.
Are we not losing something in these days of instant communication? It's like birthday cards, a text just isn't the same really.
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You make a very good point Rose. Like you, I didn't have a penpal but I did learn to write in a style known as Italic Script. Today, as you point out, communication is instant but I have found that responding with a hand written letter grabs attention, and most often, gets a problem resolved. One of my favourite comments came from a utility company. They had been so inept, so infuriating but in their reply someone had written. "You may like to know that your letter was passed around the office." It went on further. "Incoming emails are sorted by an AI program, you dodged that in one."

There might be a way that you could see how my handwriting gets such a response, but if there is such a way, I am afraid it's beyond me. However, I can still give you an example and simply photograph it with my phone. Here for you then is why the handwritten word is king.

letter 001.JPGText & Emails 003.JPG
 

yes I had penpals as a teen... I wrote to a guy in the RAF who was stationed in Wales..lol.. ...later in life I had several penpals in the USA... 2 in Florida..one in Raleigh, ..one in Tasmania..Australia, one in St Johns' NF Canada.. and another in Kelowna BC
 
I had many penpals starting when I was a teen and penpalled heavily until around ten years ago or so. I remember the name of my first pal... a girl in Canada. At one point during the 80s, I had dozens at a time but then Internet got so popular and we drifted. There was one lady in California I started writing to around 1982 and we actually found each other again online but then she died a couple of years ago and that ended a nearly 40 year old friendship. :cry:
 
Prior to the days of immediate communications in the early 1970’s, I can still remember the pleasures of getting actual paper letters from friends and family when away at college! The delays in getting replies were a sweet anticipation that made real letters all the more special. In composing a paper letter, you tend to think carefully about what you write and will physically send out. That made sending a letter out a special act, almost a sacrament. We did lose something special when we went to electronic communications.

I do today have an e-mail penpal of sorts, but it’s not the same as those finely-crafted, paper letters of days past. I still have paper letters from my deceased parents that mean a lot to me, and have endured because they are “hard copies” decades old…
 
@Firefox, That's very beautifully written!

I remember as a child, I had two cousins in Oslo, Norway and we were penpals for awhile. Their names were "Od" and "Id".
I think it was a school project or something.
But yes, the old fashioned pen and ink letters had a romance and a sweetness about them.
They were lovely, and the words written were from the soul.
 
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I now have 'penpals' on Messenger. We message daily, helping each other through the ups and downs if life. I find it a comfort as we turn to each other when trouble comes, without disturbing each others' time. It is good because we write and reply as and when we have a few minutes and it feels like we are right next to each other. Our friendships are very genuine, built through the pandemic as we found ourselves isolated physically from everyone.

Having said that, there is something very important in our handwriting, in letters or cards. It is unique. Typing is so different, somehow remote. We do however each have our ways of expression, turns of phrase. So we reach out across distance and physical separate with our personalities.
 
When I was a teenager about 14-year-old I had several pen pals mainly due to the encouraging of my mother. One pen pal was from Hawaii and was a girl a few years older than me. We wrote back and forth many times and then went our ways. Being I was a boy, and she was a girl we did not have much in common and we stopped wrighting. Years later I was in the Army stationed in Hawaii and remembered her. I would have been about 27 and she 30 years old. I looked up her name in the Hawaii phone book and to my surprise there must have been about 30 people with the same name. I lost my desire to find her then but later wished I would have. Maybe we could have have a good relationship.
 
horseless carriage said:
You make a very good point Rose. Like you, I didn't have a penpal but I did learn to write in a style known as Italic Script. Today, as you point out, communication is instant but I have found that responding with a hand written letter grabs attention, and most often, gets a problem resolved. One of my favourite comments came from a utility company. They had been so inept, so infuriating but in their reply someone had written. "You may like to know that your letter was passed around the office." It went on further. "Incoming emails are sorted by an AI program, you dodged that in one."

There might be a way that you could see how my handwriting gets such a response, but if there is such a way, I am afraid it's beyond me. However, I can still give you an example and simply photograph it with my phone. Here for you then is why the handwritten word is king.

View attachment 289721View attachment 289725
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Such lovely handwriting! Like a piece of art. It really makes a difference.
 
Out of curiosity, this thread sent me to my Gmail account for a look-see. Used to be a script font was available and I used that for a while in personal Email communications. See it is no longer an available font option. Guess it has fallen out of favor. Miss it though. Have considered preparing an Email reply in script as a document attachment. Opted out of that before even trying it as an exercise in futility.

Yeah, penpals would be nice to consider again, but then again one never knows what one will get when casting a net about.
 
Lawrence said:
When I was a teenager about 14-year-old I had several pen pals mainly due to the encouraging of my mother. One pen pal was from Hawaii and was a girl a few years older than me. We wrote back and forth many times and then went our ways. Being I was a boy, and she was a girl we did not have much in common and we stopped wrighting. Years later I was in the Army stationed in Hawaii and remembered her. I would have been about 27 and she 30 years old. I looked up her name in the Hawaii phone book and to my surprise there must have been about 30 people with the same name. I lost my desire to find her then but later wished I would have. Maybe we could have have a good relationship.
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Perhaps you might find her on Facebook. It would be incredible.
 
ArnoldC said:
Out of curiosity, this thread sent me to my Gmail account for a look-see. Used to be a script font was available and I used that for a while in personal Email communications. See it is no longer an available font option. Guess it has fallen out of favor. Miss it though. Have considered preparing an Email reply in script as a document attachment. Opted out of that before even trying it as an exercise in futility.

Yeah, penpals would be nice to consider again, but then again one never knows what one will get when casting a net about.
Click to expand...
What are you talking about lol!
 
I replied to an American who was going to Indiana when she graduated from High School to join the forces , I think we only exchanged a couple of letters , I got her name from out a Teen Magazine ,I was so excited to get a letter from America , I remember the Blue Airmail letter that folded into an Envelope that I sent ,, so it was just one page really .

I remember her first name was Deanna
 
I had an English penpal when I was a kid. I still remember her address: Ainsworth Road, Weaverham, Northwich, Cheshire, England. I have no idea where that is, but I'll always remember her address. She was a nice girl; wonder what became of her?

Thanks for reawakening an ancient memory.
 
Sunny I once lived in that lovely village for a while - can't recall Ainsworth rd but it was and still is a village of 6000 souls how about that for instant penpalling from the same place!!
 
In college, we had to write to a convict. I don't remember why, it was a long time ago. I picked some guy, who was a murderer- not an uncommon thing in prison. I didn't expect a return letter, but he did write back. In his letters, he seemed cold, and not a really warm. normal person. This lasted only a few weeks.
 

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