YOU’VE probably sent them all for recycling by now, but how many Christmas cards did you receive this year? Was it fewer than last? Did you send as many yourself?

I reckon a simple straw poll would reveal that overall we accounted for many fewer visits from the postman. Now that’s not necessarily to say that fewer people got in touch over the festive season. It may have spared us from the dreaded round-robin of family tales, stuffed into mass-produced images of unlikely snow-covered jolly Dickensian villages, but I’ll bet you that e-mail, the phone, or text messages accounted for a sizeable portion of your tidings of good will.

Of course, it also contributed to the woes of the Royal Mail which is staring at a decline of five million fewer letters posted over the last two years. Furthermore how many of us bothered to pen a personal note of thanks for gifts received? As a child I would dread the enforced Boxing Day ritual of thank-you letters; I’m sure their lack of spontaneity was self-evident.

Nevertheless, a genuine well-meant token of appreciation is uplifting to both parties. Letters home have always brought cheer to separated relatives. Like many students going away for first time, I recall the instruction to ‘write home’ reinforced with bribes of ‘posh’ writing paper or a shiny fountain pen – well it was a while ago!

It wasn’t a bad discipline, even though it could feel a bit of a chore on occasion. How times have changed. During the latest round of sales, I wandered St Helier seeking a similar gift opportunity for a new generation of scribes. It felt like a hunt for the Holy Grail. No familiar packs of ‘Three – or was it four – candles’, maybe I’m thinking of another shopping experience!

Come to think of it, I didn’t see too many traditional pens either, apart from really expensive ones, which are more likely these days to be destined for retirement presentations.

We appear to have gone through a full circle. In Victorian times, Christmas cards were predominantly hand-made and exchanged only among the closest friends and family. In recent times, the outpouring of seasonal greetings reached epidemic proportions, with personal and company lists in the hundreds mailed to people you didn’t really know but felt you had to contact just because it was Christmas. There are many factors that have contributed to the current decline: cost, time, the fact that letter-writing is not considered a valued social skill any more, and of course the telecommunications revolution.

Even if we do receive letters and printed material, do we actually read them? I’m told that while the sale of books remains buoyant, public libraries have seen a significant drop in borrowing. Is it that we don’t have the time, or are we not being taught how to read and appreciate the printed word? The collected e-mails of Jane Austen doesn’t sound quite so appealing somehow. Changing office culture has played a part too. With neither the secretarial staff, nor the time available, ‘Take a letter, Miss Jones’, is about as defunct as ‘Are you being served?’

So, if we don’t write any more, how do we communicate? Well there’s texting – no young person would be seen without a mobile phone. With thumbs wheeling in RSI-defying contortions, they whizz through an abbreviated hieroglyphic lexicon which would defy the most hardy Times cross-worder or seasoned Scrabbler. Even the linguistically conservative French have espoused the mixture of letters and numbers to streamline out all those ‘e’s.

Then there’s e-mail. Do you know it’s estimated that we spend three hours each day e-mailing each other, not necessarily saying much but desperately wedded to this displacement activity. There are screen junkies so addicted that they suffer stress and panic attacks if they can’t get their daily fix at the keyboard. It doesn’t improve inter-personal skills though, some have been dismissed by e-mail, others, divorced.

Back to the most significant casualty of this revolution, the traditional institution known generally as ‘the mail’. It’s been with us a long time. The Jersey Post Office was set up back in 1794. It too has been feeling the chill of fewer letters through the box – 150,000 fewer in fact this year, that’s a drop of three per cent. Of course, the Post Office is more than simply a letter posting agency, and Jersey Post does better than others because of the huge increase in business created by the fulfilment industry.

Elsewhere, things are less healthy. The Royal Mail finds itself competing fiercely with commercial operators able to cherry-pick the lucrative areas of the market without the need to adhere to its national mandate.
The less business it attracts, the greater the threat of closures – particularly in outlying areas.

I’m reminded of the arguments put forward when the Beeching axe fell on British Railways branch lines in the 60s. When you’ve got a business to run, you can’t afford the bits of it which cost disproportionately more just because it’s a public service. So bang goes a whole raft of sub-post offices and daily deliveries to far flung letter boxes. I rue the decline in sociability that inevitably follows from this.

Along with postmen, there used to be bakers and milkmen making regular calls to the door, even policemen walking the street – when did you last see one of those? Extrapolate further and the nightmare will reveal a society in which we’re deprived of any personal communication at all. Oh dear, sounds like hobby-horse time again. Sorry I wrote you such a long letter, Oscar, I didn’t have time to write a short one!