I have, until recently, regarded the post as something that happens to other people. Bills are not post. Bills are weather.
The huxi people inform me that the column now goes out by email. This was presented to me as good news, in the way that things are presented as good news by people who have already done them. There is, apparently, a list. People are on it. Some of you arrived this week, by way of a small notice on the website that I have not looked at and do not intend to look at, because there is a version of me that would screenshot it and send it to someone with a comment, and I am trying to starve that version.
What was not presented to me, and what I discovered on Monday, is that an address comes with it. Correspondence can now arrive. Has, in fact, arrived. Three people have written. One of them wrote at eleven forty at night, which I mention not because I was checking at eleven forty but because the time is printed on the thing, and the time is doing a great deal of work.
I am not going to quote anybody. I will say that none of the three wrote about the products, and all three wrote the way women talk at four o'clock — which is to say, the letter that arrived was not the letter they sat down to send. The sat-down letter was about the column, or the weather in one case, which I respected. The actual letter was further down, after a paragraph break, the way the real thing always is. You put the cheese course between yourself and it.
I told Margaret that people had written to me. She asked if they wanted anything. It is a fair question, and the answer, as far as I can tell, is no — which is the part I keep returning to on the bus. Advice is what the magazines are for. Nobody writes to me for advice; I have made my position on wisdom clear. What they appear to want is to put the thing down somewhere it will be read and not made into a conversation. To say here and not here, because. I have written before about that transaction. I did not expect to end up on the receiving side of it.
So, for the record, the arrangement. There is an address — charlie@huxi.global — and it reaches me, which I am told is the point of an address. I will read everything. I will reply when there is something to say, which may be rarely, and may be one word, and you should know that one word is not me being short with you. One word, in my experience, is the whole correspondence done properly.
[The huxi people would like me to say "welcome" to the new arrivals. I have been asked to note this clearly. Welcome.]
You may write. I will read it. We will both proceed as though this is nothing.
What I will not be doing is building a community. There will be no replies printed, no problems page, no "one reader writes." If your letter ever surfaces here it will be unrecognisable to everyone including you, which is the only honest promise a columnist can make. The letters are not material. The letters are letters.
I did not expect to like having correspondents. I have not yet decided that I do. The reading, however, I can recommend. It is the four-o'clock thing, arriving at eleven forty, from women I have never met, and it turns out the paragraph break is visible from quite a long way off.
— Charlie is not a community. She would like that noted in perpetuity.
— Charlie