Postman Pat and his cat are on strike again. I jeered at them not long ago wondering what good they were for in our modern day of paperless, electronic communication. I was telling them to go join Bobby the Blacksmith and Jenny the Seamstress who were guest appearing in their local museum at the Exhibition of Extinct Occupations. But I since had a change of heart.

There was a brief period of insanity I underwent about two years ago when, unaware, I had been drawn into the seedy world of internet chat dungeons. I had since discovered that the IQ level of communication facilitated by those outlets was in negative numbers, the topics were at best fresh from the local flea market’s gutter and the language indecipherable. It seems people of all ages and persuasions flock to those places to… blabber. There is no conscious thought in those conversations, no ideas, no meaning. It’s just a high speed train station drowned in the stream of disturbed sub-consciousness of very boring and bored individuals killing one another with details of their stomach content.

You can’t hold a conversation there. I knew a few people who, like me, tried to converse via those “messengers” but sooner or later, we would all succumb to intellectual inaction, to splashing in mud of shallow, lazy stupidity where talking was the purpose in itself. Not even the form mattered! In fact, I think those messengers and chat rooms will ultimately kill the last standing conventions of written language. Soon we will all be articulate but illiterate.

Yesterday I listened to an interview with Philip Roth who expressed his regret about the death of public interest in literary fiction and the emergence of what I would call sensationalised abridged novellas (a la Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code) as the mainstream fiction of our times. It is still better if people read Da Vinci Code rather than languish on MSN reading some illiterate uncle’s accounts of his last visit to the toilet, but it isn’t exactly lineal progress from Shakespeare and Dickens in cultural development of the Western World either.

So that brings me back to Postman Pat and letter writing – proper, grammatically correct, meaningful letter writing where you think before you put pen to paper, where you construct your thoughts and sentences carefully, where no one is rushing you on the other side with nudging alarms and moronic smiley faces, where you actually have something to say. I miss that. I know people who I would love to receive a letter from if only once a year, rather than spend every evening blabbering on with about their piles. And the smell of ink before it dries – priceless! SO BRING BACK POSTMAN PAT!!!