If I don't write back, there might be some space in the non-response into which I could scuttle and hide . . . e-mail keeps you more honest, writes John Butler.
I DON'T GET LETTERS all that often, so when I do I tend to remember them. The good people in the office forwarded me one a while back from a man who read a piece I had written about Hiberno-English place names. In it he offered up his own experience of a strange place name. He used to drive from Clare to visit his wife in Cork University Hospital, and every time he passed through Twopothouse, he would wonder to himself how such an ugly town name came into existence.
Seán thought the townland might originally have been called "nua thuath fo-thuas", clumsily renamed "Twopothouse" phonetically by an English administration given at the time to midwiving freaks of nomenclature. It was a terrific letter, asking for nothing more than the continuation of a discussion I had started in these very pages. I could offer a litany of excuses for my delay in responding to him - moving country, busy with work, didn't have stamp. The truth was I didn't bother.
I must have wanted to respond though, because I kept that letter with me, and while unpacking boxes in my new home a few months later, I came across it once again. There it was, the two pages torn from a ring-bound floppy notebook; the kind whose pages you flip over at the top. There was the neat cursive script resembling that of my aunt, and this time I noticed the e-mail address at the foot of the second page, whose letters indicated that Seán might be a mature student who had returned to college - to study English Literature perhaps, or Irish History. Again, I cursed myself. Surely to God I could write him an e-mail.
Finally I did so, in the middle of May, in which I thanked him for his note, wished him well and offered back a few more hideous place names at which we could have a laugh. I hit the send button and felt saintly - because I had managed to clear a few minutes in my hideously overcrowded schedule of playing poker, surfing the web and watching the yellow Sky Sports News ticker crawl past, to type out a response.
About three weeks later, the reply came in the form of an e-mail response from Seán's daughter. She wanted to let me know that, after a long battle with cancer, her father had passed away a few months before. She checks his e-mail periodically, and wasn't aware that he had written to me until she read my response to his letter. She asked that I return Seán's letter to her in the unlikely event I had kept it, so that she could keep it as a keepsake.
I spent last night scrambling around my newly arranged, sorted and purged-of-all-extraneous-scraps-of-paper home, praying to God that I had held on to Seán's letter after sending my e-mailed response to him. As I searched through instructions for coffee machines that had long since broken, business cards offering minicab services I would never use, and election leaflets for politicians for whom I could never vote, I was forced to face the possibility that I was the kind of person who could have thrown the letter out.
It takes time to compose a thoughtful letter and then assemble the materials required for sending it to the addressee. My guilt could now only be compounded if I had to tell Seán's daughter that I had binned the letter.
Or was there a more shameful course of action open to me? Of course there was. I could avoid telling his daughter that I had lost it by not responding to her e-mail at all. Sitting in my livingroom, encircled by piles of junk mail, for a moment I entertained the thought. If I don't write back, there might be some space in the non-response into which I could scuttle and hide.
Anecdotal evidence suggests I'm not alone in this avoidance of responsibility. If the success rate was nearly as bad as the many millions of "it-must-have-got-lost-in-the-post" excuses would suggest, the postal service would have folded long ago. When you are as non-confrontational as I am, this is what the mind will do - offer every possible detour around the grindingly obvious conclusion.
E-mail keeps you more honest because if you respond with it, you can have faith that the mail will be delivered. If you're waiting for the reply and it isn't delivered, you can be fairly sure that the sender has received a notification saying so, and then the ball is back in their court. If you do write someone an e-mail and it makes it to their inbox, you can be sure that they will read it.
I decided to compose my apology on paper, handwritten. I thought it was only fair that I should put some effort into it, considering how careless I had been. Hang on, that's nonsense. I was clinging to the possibility that it would be lost in the post and Seán's daughter would never get to read the horrible truth about how I threw out the letter. So I laboured over a hypothetical apology, scrawling with tongue stuck out, dotting "I"s, crossing "t"s, finding envelopes and stamps.
Outside the house, I dug my right hand in my jacket pocket to find keys to lock the door and felt my fingers brush at the edge of another piece of paper. Hang on just a damn minute. There it was! I pulled out Seán's letter and went back inside, tore up the apology letter, dug out a fresh stamp and envelope and wrote out the right response. When it was finished I wrapped it in the letter that started it all and found a postbox. Walking back home it struck me that I didn't deserve the peace of mind. In fact, the most fitting outcome would be if - after all this - the postman lost it.