Write a letter
This weekend on government advice, we are going to start asking people to isolate themselves.
The fact is that a significant proportion of the over 70’s population live alone and get very little in the way of human contact. We can only guess at the impact of 12 weeks total isolation.
How can we as a society work around this? Skype certainly offers a solution, putting a friendly face at the end of a community screen, making some welcome contact. But many people of this generation are not comfortable using computers.
Phone calls and emails help, but can be very impersonal.
Why not write a letter?
I do not mean by this – type a letter up on your laptop and print it out. I mean hand write a letter. It is personal. Your handwriting is more personal and idiosyncratic not just to you, but to the person reading it.
This does matter. A typed letter could just as easily be from the council, the bank or a utility company.
A handwritten letter is different. Particularly to a generation that grew up with letters as the main way of communicating to people who you could not see or who were too far away to visit.
You can bring a little colour and give a real personal connection to someone who is likely to be lonely. You can of course pop in a few photographs to add to the personal touch.
If as seems likely, we all have a little more time spare over the weeks ahead, why not use that time to write to someone who is lonely, self isolating and starved of human contact.
Help them to know they are not alone and not on their own.
How would we post it if isolated?
Well maybe some people under the age of 70 will write letters too. In fact the point was to suggest that those who are not self isolating could actually do something for those that are. And as we understand it, there is nothing to stop you going to the post box as long as you keep social distance.