It turns out that Avril and I are very similar… weirdly similar. We both enjoy the simple things, mainly sunshine as the winter and cold weather makes us depressed, we both love dogs and flowers and just being outside, not really doing much but just being. We even have the same favourite walk from Waterloo Station to St Katherine’s Dock which we both remember in different time periods.

Over the weeks we delve into the topic of communication, something Avril is extremely passionate about. She tells me that she worries that communication just isn’t the same anymore. That phones are getting in the way and destroying creativity. That we all spend too much time staring into screens and not looking each other in the face.

So she takes me back. Way back, to when she was a child and the postman would come. She would sit on the third step everyday and wait for the familiar thump of letters on the mat. There was rarely anything for her, but every now and then there’d be something. Whether that was a letter, or a postcard and she remembers that she was thrilled by the romance of it. The sitting down and commitment of pen to paper, not obviously being able to delete anything just having to put it down, and send it off never knowing if you’d hear anything back. 

I tell her about my friend, my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were four. And although, most often we talk via text, she sends me postcards wherever she goes. I keep them all in a little box on my bookshelf, they date back about 10 years and chart us all the way through university and the start of our adult lives. I tell Avril about the pact my friend and I made where we started to send each other the sexiest postcard we can find and that I’m much better at this than she is, although she is much better at remembering to send postcards. It strikes me that this is the only friendship I have like this. The only concrete memories I have in this digital world, the record of a friendship which nowadays is relatively uncommon. 

Avril loves this. I think she’s glad to know that the art of conversation isn’t dead. Because the impression I get is that she feels it is dying, the more we talk the more this becomes clear until she finally tells me that all she wants is for people to talk to her, properly, she misses people talking to her about normal everyday things. That even if she has no idea what’s going on, she likes to be spoken to like a person. And that she wants to tell her stories, before they’re gone.