Yesterday morning I spotted a letter lying on the dining table. It was addressed to my father, who is a teacher. The letter was from the rector of his school. I read through it. It was quite a crap letter really. It really just said, “Thanks, and have a good holiday.” As if people normally expect their employers to write a letter giving them the bird for no good reason.

I am not sure if such letters are standard practice, but it did seem to be a bit of a waste to me. Not just a waste of money in terms of postage costs — but a waste of time of whoever wrote it, and a waste of time of all the people who had to read the rather banal letter.

I don’t know what my father thought of the letter. But if I was the recipient of it, I think I would have thrown it in the bin. And I would have thought to myself, “If they were really sincere about it, why did they not say that to my face?”

Reluctant Hero at Our Scotland is pretty impressed by a similar letter which has been sent out by Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon to every employee of NHS Scotland.

From cleaner to consultant, the letter thanked us for efforts, particularly over the last week or so.

Now this is hardly anything worthy of the BBC running a special news bulletin on, but I think it is extremely significant. It shows, in my opinion, the massive difference between the SNP in government and the Labour Party in government.

I doubt that any Labour MSP ever wrote to a public sector employee to say “bollocks to the lot of you!” Given the banal nature of Nicola Sturgeon’s message, of course the first thing I did was work out how much it cost to send it.

The NHS Scotland website says that it employed approximately 158,000 people in 2006. This means that sending a letter to each NHS Scotland employee by second class would cost £37,920. Which is quite a lot more than an average annual income.

Of course, it is a drop in the ocean in terms of public spending. But I just thought I’d say, you know. It seems like a bit of a pointless letter to send. It might have given NHS employees a fuzzy feeling inside for half a day or so. But beyond that, I doubt it was really worth the thirty-eight thousand big ones to tell people something that is surely a given.

Is handwriting really needed any more? Kids around the world are forgetting how to handwrite — because all of the writing we do is on the computer. It’s a familiar story. Every time we went back to school after the long summer break, my friends and I would all comment that the most difficult thing was getting used to writing again. “I haven’t had to write anything for about two months!” So every year our handwriting would get a little bit worse.

That wasn’t just because we were using computers all the time. It was just that there really isn’t much need to write at all is there? The only thing I can think of is letter writing. But how often do you do that? Once a year, if that? Maybe, back in the day, people wrote letters to each other. Nowadays people keep in touch by IM or text message. Or, if you’re really old-fashioned, by email. No need to lift a pen.

It’s sensible for me just to avoid writing altogether because my handwriting is a complete mess, and it has been probably since I started secondary school. My lowercase letters are all over the place. If I’m not careful, my ‘b’ looks like an ‘S’, my ‘a’ and ‘o’ both look like an ‘e’, my ‘i’ looks like an ‘l’, my ‘g’ looks like a ‘y’, ‘m’ looks like an ‘n’. And ‘v’ and ‘u’ look exactly the same.

The article says, “Teenagers are still experimenting with their handwriting and trying out new things”. The shocking thing is, I’m not a teenager, and I’m still experimenting with my handwriting. I could cope with all of the other things because I could understand myself what I was writing. But when my ‘v’ and ‘u’ began to look the same I had to take action. In the past couple of months I’ve actually added on a tail to my ‘u’. I never used to add tails because I thought they were a waste of time. Now they are how I tell a ‘u’ (or a ‘U’) from a ‘v’ (or ‘V’).

It became necessary because a lot of the equations I have to use at university involve a u or a v — often in the same place, meaning subtly different things. But I can’t be confusing them or I will get myself… well, confused. At the same time I’m coping with how to write Greek letters. Before it was just π in maths and the occasional μ in physics.

Now, in economics, I have to grapple regularly with Σ, θ, δ, γ, α and the dreaded σ. When you’re struggling with the Latin alphabet, the last thing you want to do is work out how to write a σ (my ‘σ’ actually looks like ‘δ’!).

Whenever I have to handwrite a note or something, I always write it in all capitals. Not print, though, because I am such a lazy bastard that I can’t even be bothered to write neatly in block capitals. My capitals used to be neat — when I was in primary school. But when my lowercase letters became illegible and I moved on to using capitals instead — well, of course my capitals became illegible as well. Nevertheless, it is the least-worst option. Although I always have to apologise and explain that I’m not shouting!

I don’t have a signature either. Well I do, but it’s basically just a scrawl. I’ve tried practicing writing my name, but I think I am actually physically incapable of doing it. It looks kind of like “D____ Sl_____”. Distinctive, in a way, but it’s just a scrawl. Some people are genuinely shocked by my signature.

Despite my uneasy relationship with handwriting, I find it absolutely fascinating. It’s interesting to note how different people can take such radically different approaches to writing the same symbols. My friend and I had a discussion about somebody else. I just said, “I like her ‘a’s.” My friend thought I was using some kind of secret man-code euphemism. But no. I genuinely like her lowercase ‘a’.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have a girlfriend.

Via Digg.