Join The Sunday Letter Writing Project

As a student I would pay regular visits to a stationery shop on Walton Street in Oxford. I bought A4 sheets of rainbow coloured velum with matching envelopes. As I grew older my fascination with stationery, notebooks and journals grew with me. I delighted in the joy of creating bespoke invitations to dinner parties and more formal occasions or filling my inkpen and writing long letters of thanks or congratulations. I even posses a writing slope, although it is now used mostly for storage!

It was not just the simple slow pleasure of writing a letter that poured balm on my hectic week, the receiving of a letter that is not from HMRC or Thames Water means its time to put the kettle on, break open the jaffa cakes and take time for me.

It is because of that love that started with rainbow paper and ended with letters to and from pals and a feeling that so many of us could benefit from creating new connections that I decided The Madhatter Bookshop should join The Sunday Letter Writing Project.

If this appeals to you, read on.

The Sunday Letter Project is a weekly invitation to balance. To recalibrate, reconnect, and return home. We believe that letter-writing is the perfect antidote to our dependence on technology.

By signing up for the project, you will be invited to take a pledge: a pledge to take a pocket of time each Sunday and dedicate it to yourself and your loved ones. To write, to ponder, to savour. To regenerate a practice that has connected humans for generations and is starting to be lost. We believe letter writing is a unique way that we can find our way home as humans, and we invite you to join us.

We hope that you will be able to keep your promise to yourself, and fall in love with the ritual of letter writing. Choosing an ink, adding in stickers or photographs, picking out an envelope. The way that handwriting holds emotion and feeling within its distinctive lines. The way it freezes time and provides a portal into a moment that can never otherwise be revisited. The enormous, unique feeling of delight when you spot an envelope on your doormat with scrawled ink and know that someone has set aside that time, thought, and energy just for you.

A letter is the exact opposite of how we usually communicate now. In a world of text and email, people expect communication to be instant, casual, and constant. I think so many of us are tired of this way of being and are ready to step back into a gentle rhythm of meaningful, thoughtful correspondence. If that is you, please accept our invitation, and begin to write your way home.

How to get started?

1. Write an introductory letter, only need use your first name or many letter writers use a pseudonym such as, A Keen Gardener or A New Mother and for the address add The Madhatter Bookshop, 122 High Street, Burford, OX18 4QJ - letters are held safely — a modern twist on the old Poste Restante system.

2. Hand your letter to a member of staff at The Madhatter Bookshop.

3. Once we have a few letters they will be placed in a basket at the shop. Visitors from local and far away will be able to peruse the letters and respond. Or you may wish to select a letter yourself - when responding add our address and the name / pseudonym of the perosn you are responding to.

   And so connections begin.

Be you a rainbow lover, a white velum writer or a postcard scribbler, dig out your pencil, biro, fountain or quill and lets make connections.

Please note this project is currently only for the over 18's but we are looking at more ideas.

Happy scribbling!

Kim