From Letters to Tweets

I sit here now, typing away on my keyboard at my desktop PC, with my iPhone next to me occasionally vibrating as I work, notifying me of a tweet, a blog comment, an Instagram like. I’ve written a few blog posts today, ready to share my thoughts with anyone and everyone deigning to listen, and as soon as I hit publish, people can immediately access my random ramblings. A quick tweet out, just 140 characters taking seconds to write, connects me to hundreds of others – some people that I know, some I’ve never had any communication with whatsoever. My own little broadcasting platform, like millions of other bloggers and social media users around the world. This is communication in the fast-lane. No waiting for editing, printing, sending, nope, it’s just out there. Things move quickly, and it’s strange to think how comfortable I am with all of this. It’s all perfectly normal to me now, but I suspect that I come from the last generation where we didn’t have all of this technology at our finger tips growing up.

When I was at school, our forays into technology were to have one PC in the whole of the primary school, that got wheeled around from classroom to classroom throughout the week. I vaguely recall some sort of game with a witch and a poisoned apple – anyone got any more details on that one?! We had a computer at home for playing games on, but boy, did they take a long time to load! When we had topics to research and write for school, we’d go to the library to look at books, actual books, or use the encyclopaedias at home. When I was a little older, I used to spend all day long at school with my best mate, and then come home and call her. On the land-line, as mobile phones were only really for businesses, and they were huge brick-like things! So, when my mum inevitably told me to get off the phone, I had been with her all day after all, I’d take to my room, and I’d write. Yes, my friend and I liked writing to each other, in fact, I still have some of those letters. I didn’t keep diaries, and these are the closest reflection of my teen self that I have, as we shared all of our thoughts with each other, often angst-ridden – we were teenagers, after all! There was no other way to communicate. I couldn’t update my Facebook status, I couldn’t email her, and I couldn’t even text back then (I am that old!).

Now, I would not be without blogging and social media. It’s incredibly important to me, and a world that I feel very comfortable in. But, let’s not forget about the good old-fashioned ways. The paper and pen. We’ve been communicating this way for hundreds of years, so let’s keep it going.

To illustrate my point, and tempt you in, I thought I’d take a little journey through the rather fabulous stationery range over at John Lewis, so you could see how lovely it is and appreciate it, and I may have got a little bit overexcited when I popped there, because, well, just look at it all! As sharing the entire shop seemed a little OTT, I’ve managed to limit it a little and picked just a few favourites…

The Happy Jackson range..

Happy Jackson Stationery Range

Liberty Art Nouveau Notecards

Liberty Art Nouveau Notecards, Pack of 16

Art File Stationery

Art File Stationery

There are so many gorgeous collections there, that I’m sure there must be something to suit everyone’s tastes and tempt you back to the olden days? Surely, this should call for us to #BringBackPaper and yearn for those days gone by when paper was all we had? For me, I embrace current technology, but I still ensure a fair bit of pen to paper action takes place here, too, so let’s get the best of both worlds. Read the blog, tweet and share it, and then get writing, the good old-fashioned way 😉

Disclosure: Post written in collaboration with John Lewis, to celebrate their 150 years anniversary

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5 thoughts on “From Letters to Tweets”

  1. Pingback: John Lewis celebrates 150 years of ‘a better way of doing business’ | The Reading Residence

  2. One computer being wheeled around the school? Before you were born I went to see our NHS computer which took up the space of 4 rooms!

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