Over the March Break my youngest cousin came to visit me. I had grand plans for what we would do. But between my young cousin’s penchant for sleeping til mid afternoon and my tendency to go to bed early, we were unable to fit everything in. We did however manage to take over a hundred pictures for me to use on my blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts. This creative photo op came at the cost of another planned activity, something that I only remembered after my visitor had returned home. The following is a letter I wrote to rectify the situation. And the letter after that is the letter I wrote to rectify the situation that I tried to rectify.

Dear Young Person,

Last week I awkwardly photobombed your Skype session with your friend Candy* in order to obtain your address. It was my intent that Candy would practice the lost art of letter writing and send some post to you. However because of poor time management on my part this never occurred. I realized the other day that not only did I fail to instill the importance of handwritten correspondence in my youngest cousin but I also robbed an innocent young person of the pleasure of receiving a letter in the mail. An exciting experience if there ever was one. So I am writing to you now. Though it occurs to me that I have no more to say so I’ve included a poorly drawn cartoon of what Candy and I did instead of writing to you.

Because the only thing better than receiving a letter from a complete stranger is receiving a letter and a drawing with unintelligible labels. Also best of luck everyone in deciphering my writing. As my Gran says “We love getting your letters! Especially after we figure out what they say.”

Dear Candy,

Roscoe intercepted my letter to your friend. He said that it was wildly inappropriate for me to write to someone I’ve never met and have only seen when I awkwardly leaped into the background of your Skype conversation. He suggested I should write to you instead and that you could show the young person in question the letter if you so chose.

Roscoe’s been raining on my parades of late. Just last week he broke up a starfish racing ring I’d been trying to set up.

“But it’s brilliant” I cried “Starfish don’t have any knees for mob thugs to break!” Roscoe gruffly replied “It’s the people’s knees who bet on the racing that mobsters break.”

Perhaps he did me a favour, I’m now seeing that I should start a people racing ring for starfish to bet on because then no one’s knees would be hurt by the mobsters and it might combat the obesity epidemic this country has going.

Much love, thanks for visiting me,

The Great Unwashed

*Names have been changed but only in the post because otherwise it would just be really strange to send a letter to a person who you don’t know about a person that they know but whose name has been changed. The concept alone makes the above sentence confusing, and the poor grammar just adds to the problem.