A Letter To The Editor

Why do people send letters to the editor? It's time consuming and when the subject is anti-anti-anti smoking, or Lebanon, or similar, apt to cause depression.
I would like to suggest a more modest past time that I have of late been indulging in: that of sending a letter to the editor.

It all began one lazy Saturday afternoon, several months ago, when, in a capricious mood, I took a clear A4 sheet of paper, printed out the letter -

G!


- folded it up, and placed it in a yellow envelope and posted it off to the newspaper that very afternoon.
About a week later, I received the following response in the mail:

W?

A fair question, I thought. And so, over time, my game of a Saturday afternoon turned into a pleasant method of whiling away a quiet weekend; I would print out and neatly enclose in an envelope a letter from the alphabet, occasionally punctuated with an exclamation mark, full-stop, ellipsis, or some other simple grammatical device to make my point clear.
On one occasion, for instance, this was my memorable conversation opener:

O!

To which editor replied:

I ...

Bemused, I asked:

Y?

Over time, I hope to graduate from single letters to double letters, and then from double letters to whole words. But that is far in the future. My hope is that, by sending the newspapers an ample supply of alphabetical items, I will replenish their diminished stocks, and thereby revivify the moribund art of newspaper publishing, making it, once more, a proud and noble tradition. One must be careful, of course. If one sends in too many stocks of the one type of letter, then newspapers are likely to accrue stocks of sinister acronyms, such as the SS, or the KKK.

But, as I say, that is all far in the future. Until then ...

B ...