Hand Delivered

My workday consists mainly of menial tasks; I count envelopes and answer phones and reply to emails. I hardly ever feel like I am being useful and when the others are out and the phone isn’t ringing sometimes I turn on the radio and spin in circles in my swivel chair until I feel dizzy. And then I spin in the other direction. I like doing errands because it means I can get out of the office. So when I was asked to hand deliver a letter I was thrilled. The young man who was to receive it was not working too far away and the letter contained an important request that needed answering quickly so speed, I assume, was the main reason I was chosen over Royal Mail to get the letter to him. An outline of what needed to be said was dictated to me and I typed it up, printed it, and got it signed. Then off I went with the letter sealed inside an addressed envelope and ‘by hand’ written where the stamp should be.

I also suspect that the hand delivery of this particular letter was a psychological tactic that my boss was using against the young man. I think he intended the arrival of a request in the hands of a young (female) assistant to have more impact than it falling on to the doormat in the morning. And you must tell him you’ll see him again next week. Really? Oh yes, he is coming to that dinner as well; I shall sit you next to each other. And he winked at me.

It was a sunny day and it was nice to be outside and I took my time to get to the address. I walked in and went to the reception and asked to see the man on the envelope. The receptionist gave me a funny look, and said she didn’t think they had anyone of that name working there. But I had been given a mission and had had responsibility placed in my hands, so I assured her they did and showed her the name and address I had written out myself, and stepped back to wait whilst she found him. She called the head office and after repeating his name a few times, she confirmed that they had no one of that name working there.

I came back out into the sunshine and called my office, and told my boss that his young acquaintance wasn’t there. And when I read back the address he had given me he realised that I had been sent to the wrong place. Did I really say that? Easy mistake… It’s a similar place. The correct destination was only round the corner from me, but it wasn’t just the envelope that was wrong: the letter inside had been printed wrong too. So I had to take it all the way back, reprint it, readdress it, mark it once again ‘by hand’ and start over. Lucky the first one hadn’t gone in the post box or its important message would have been lost.

I got to the right place, asked again for the name I had written twice on two envelopes and this time it was recognised. I waited whilst they went to fetch him. A shy young man appeared to collect the letter, very tall and with a very young face even though I know he must have been a couple of years older than me. I told him where I had come from and that I had been asked to deliver the letter directly to him, and mentioned that we would be meeting again the following week, but I think he felt awkward talking to me in the hall and so I left him with the letter and went back to my office.

I went to sit out in the park on my lunch break and reread a letter I had received from my pen pal. He apologised at one point for his handwriting, saying that he didn’t like his new pen. It made me think of how strange our relationship was. We will never meet; his handwriting is the closest I will get to seeing him: it is as personal a thing as the clothes you chose to wear, or the expression on your face. You can disguise type – make it the colour or the size or the style that you want, but your writing changes with your mood, your purpose or just the pen you use. It is a slower process than typing: I cant drag my hand across a page as fast as I can move my fingertips across a keyboard, and when my pen cant keep up with my mind my writing changes again. Receiving a handwritten letter is a physical experience, the letter I was reading had once been held in the hands of someone I feel I know well, but who I have never seen, and the pages I write my words on will in a couple of days be in his hands.

This morning I had taken a letter to someone and branded it ‘by hand’, but it didn’t arrive by the hands of the writer so I wonder what right it had to claim that. Hands deliver every stamped letter too; you just don’t know whose. I wonder how many pairs of hands my letter will have to go through to get to my friend. What we cannot say face-to-face is passed hand-to-hand across the world, until my handwriting is held in his hands. It is much more worthy of a ‘by hand’ label than the formal, printed letter I carried this morning. Intimacy is being replaced with immediacy; but emails and texts will never quite have personality so imprinted in them as scribbles on a page.