Letters
Today I received a letter – a rare occurrence. This one arrived in a pale grey envelope with elegant spidery handwriting. It reminded me of being at school and the intense relationships between me and my teenage friends who lived in other parts of the UK, with the regular flow of news exchanged between us. Long before the internet, letters were it. And so was handwriting. Whoever this letter was from, it felt familiar yet like the beginning of an adventure. On opening, to my delight I saw it was from my friend Amanda Harlech, the ravishingly beautiful, brilliant fashion stylist and muse to the now departed Karl Lagerfeld, and to John Galliano in his earlier years. Amanda is like the prettiest girl in the school who you crave to be friends with. We have gradually become close over the last few decades. Once we even shared a vast bed in the Hotel Meurice in Paris where she would spend weeks at a time working on the shows with Karl, at Chanel. The bed was made up with her own antique pink linen sheets which she brought from her home in Shropshire. How chic. Anyway, this letter was the most exciting thing that has happened for ages and I tore out some pages from my sketch book and wrote back immediately, telling her everything I could think of. It is the beginning of a new dimension of our friendship. It feels radical. When I was fifteen I had a full on love affair by mail with someone I never actually met. He lived in the Lake District and was a slightly older friend of the boy I was madly in love with but wasn’t sure he felt the same. I still remember the first letter arriving on a bleak morning. I was up early. I was unhappy, I was mostly unhappy. This letter made me feel great. It was an escape from my feelings of rage and wretchedness. Writing to this person gave me a chance to explore how to say things about my feelings, even though my feelings were really about someone else. I couldn’t tell him, so I had a fantasy love affair with his friend. In this era of Insta, and the instant gratification of messaging, this letter felt like luxury. There was so much to absorb: the ink used, what kind of pen was it? How enjoyable it was not to be able to read some of the words and to decipher the refined scrawl. It made each part of the letter reverberate as I experienced it. No disgusting predictive text – I hate that so much. And writing back, ideas I hadn’t even formed coming to life and streaming from my mind and into my pen. Thank you Amanda.
