{"id":1955,"date":"2022-02-26T21:59:23","date_gmt":"2022-02-26T21:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/?p=1955"},"modified":"2022-05-14T12:30:00","modified_gmt":"2022-05-14T11:30:00","slug":"musings-before-starting-on-the-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/2022\/02\/26\/musings-before-starting-on-the-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Musings before starting on the Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

My initial thoughts before starting on the second, letter, phase of this journey, are that I am much more interested in preserving the content<\/span> of letters than the physical artefact. Perhaps this is partly because most letters are manifested on very similar, relatively uninteresting, physical objects \u2013 sheets of paper. Of course, when a missive is transmitted in an unusual physical format, such as a rolled-up scroll for example, then I know that that did influence my keep\/destroy decisions in the first pass I made through my letters 6 years ago. However, generally speaking I think I\u2019m quite happy just to be able to access the contents of most old letters electronically.<\/p>\n

Of course, letters and cards from people I am particularly emotionally attached to \u2013 such as those from my wife and children \u2013 are a different kettle of fish. I have a feeling they are the items that are going to present the biggest challenge as I try to slim down my collection of physical letters. On looking at what I\u2019d written about my earlier experience of digitising my missives<\/a> and disposing of many of the hardcopy versions, I see that I retained just over 400 letters and cards out of an initial total of about 1900<\/a>; and that 131 of these were from my wife, 85 were early letters from my parents when they were in Singapore and I was at boarding school, and 31 were from my children. I see that I also identified the following four reasons for not keeping the items I disposed of. They were: embarrassing content, embarrassing event, not interesting or special enough to keep, and won\u2019t fit into storage container. I wonder if any of those reasons will come up in the exercise I\u2019m about to embark upon \u2013 if I manage to dispose of any items at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My initial thoughts before starting on the second, letter, phase of this journey, are that I am much more interested in preserving the content of letters than the physical artefact. Perhaps this is partly because most letters are manifested on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-object-obliteration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1955"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1958,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1955\/revisions\/1958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}