When my parents received a thank-you letter from a good friend recently, we all read it with (I’m afraid) not affectionate pleasure but a rising sense of indignation. The trouble with the letter was its extreme banality. It had been a lovely party, wrote the friend, the food delicious and the company great. The nerve, we all thought. He must think we’re mindless, to send us such a string of clichés.
The writer must have felt a weight lift from his shoulders as he dropped his note into the postbox, but the truth was it would have been better had he never written at all. Platitudes by post are not worth the stamp.
So why did he bother? Why do any of us bother any more? The old-fashioned hand-written thank-you letter has today become a recurrent nightmare for both sender and recipient. As the tradition slowly dies, as emails become the norm, so it becomes increasingly hard for the younger generation to put pen to paper. And by the time they do get round to writing, they feel harassed and put-upon rather than grateful — and it shows in the prose. So wouldn’t we save ourselves a lot of anxiety and resentment if we just killed the convention off?
The curse of the thank-you letter can blight a friendship for ever. Take my friend Tommy, whose godfather used to send him a cheque for £50 at Christmas. Tommy says: ‘I used to feel so guilty about not thanking him for it that I would end up not cashing it and it would expire.’
To his godfather, Tommy must have seemed either callous or crazy. But the fact is that the conventional mode of thanks became such a psychological burden to him that he was crippled by the weight of his own gratitude.
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