Once again Jack gets his guest post in on time – –

When we rearrange things in the house (in fact all the houses we’ve lived in over the last twenty-five years), one thing has always turned up at some point.

I’m often looking through our stashed boxes of old tapes, cassettes, and records for my radio show. I end up searching under beds or in cupboards. When I do there’s always a particular box that emerges, although it doesn’t contain tapes, and it’s not a box I remember ever packing or moving.

It contains all the letters and emails that Wendy and I exchanged when we were ‘stepping out’ – except we were dating by correspondence back then, on opposite sides of the Atlantic: me in Scotland and her in Newfoundland!

The first letters are hand-written and lengthy (we called them ten-pagers because they usually were). Those first ones are charmingly diplomatic and careful. Soft-pitching woo, one might say. Then they turn into letters typed on a computer and become much less careful. One might even venture to say some fairly specific offers are being made. Finally, there are printed out emails, and they’re much shorter and to the point on events of the day, a little less kissing, a little more bitching. Wendy had to type these in a public space, and I was often at my college office, so….

While these are, of course, delightful memories of the heady days of early love, they’re also something of a time capsule. There were big changes in technology over that brief time of a few years in the mid-1990s. I bought my first home computer, so I could get back to writing the more explicit letters!

Even after we married, there was no internet as we know it now – no Google, no Facebook, no YouTube. To read or write an email you had to ‘dial-up,’ sometimes going round 4 or 5 phone numbers before connecting and then a strange noise to tell you that you had.

Now we have a car that talks to us, takes us places almost by itself and tells us how well we’ve done when we get there. Wendy and I have been married 26 years, and the other day she texted me from upstairs, and I answered her. Obla dee obla dah life goes on…..

The post title references the book by John Masefield first published in 1935.

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack