How childhood letter-writing led to a life in music

by Laura Kidd

When I was a little girl, one of my favourite possessions was a shoebox that I filled up with bits of paper, envelopes and leaflets gathered from wherever I could find them. I called it my Post Office, and every now and then I’d take the box from under the bed and pour my treasure out on the floor.

I’m hazy on the details, but I remember loving to “play Post Office”, which I imagine meant sorting the assorted paper into different piles and then putting them back in the box. Oh, how the interests of our youth can creep up on us as adults, writes the woman who spent a happy evening last week reorganising her boxes of scrap paper, stickers and magazine pages by category.

Nerd alert.

Later, somehow, I ended up writing letters to children I’d never met, who lived far away – Svetlana in Belarus and Alastair in Derbyshire. It was utterly magical to send my closely-written pages to people I would never talk to in person, carefully copying the unfamiliar Russian words onto Svet’s envelopes well enough for her to receive my missives. I only ever know my letters had arrived when she replied.

It was to Alastair I first proudly declared my aim to be a songwriter when I grew up – having never written a single song, and knowing nothing whatsoever about how to do so. Letter-writing predated those heady days when I started to discover my favourite bands by some years, but both activities were a youthful statement of independent thought at an age where actions were largely dictated by adults.

As I grew older I gathered more people to write to. My family moved every three years, so there were always friends left behind, and in my early teens I wrote to kids I met on school trips, boys at other schools, even friends at the same school as me. We challenged each other to fill up more and more pages and somehow still had enough left to say to talk on the phone for hours in the evening. The freedom I found to express myself in letters is one of my fondest memories of childhood.

On my journey into adulthood, switching to email and blogging and Twitter (2007-style) felt intuitive, but my love for words written by hand on paper never left me.

As I released music on CD, vinyl and cassette from 2009 onwards, I got to “play Post Office” more and more regularly, and my role as the maker and sender of things became clear.

Writing songs and dispatching them into the world, in whatever format, is a natural progression from the innate desire I had to connect with others from a young age.

And that, dear reader, is why I’m called Penfriend.

Now and then, then and now 

I was moved by Lucy Pepper‘s latest beautiful piece about her experiences of early blogging (not just because apparently it was inspired by one of my Notes but because her writing is awesome and I love it). I feel nostalgic for my early days of writing on the internet not because my output was so fantastic (I’ve checked), but because it all felt so free then.

“The internet” was a destination. I raced home from work to “go on it”, and happily replaced my previous TV-watching with clicking around, finding out about the world and other people, mainly through reading personal blogs. It was quite unusual to be someone regularly “surfing the internet superhighway”, online ordering was wildly exciting because you had to trust it was real (and high street shopping sucked), and finding places to stay in European cities was, weirdly, easier because there wasn’t infinite choice.

When short-form text-based social media came along in the form of Twitter, I let it steal my writing energy. I still wrote regular, friendly emails to my growing mailing list (which is why I have a job doing this today, honestly), but any public writing was sporadic at best. And this from a person who breathlessly read Writing magazine when she was 13 years old, dreaming of her certain future as a novelist.

I shake my fist at the social media oligarchs in the sky, but mostly at myself. Silly.

I’m not interested in wanging on about the platform I’m sharing stuff on – that’s too meta¹ for me, but suffice it to say I’m delighted to be stretching my writing-in-public muscles again, and excited to be here amongst friends.

Some of them I’ve been in touch with since 2012 and before (hi again Lucy Pepper, Katie Lee, Alex Milway) or way earlier (Sizemore, Documentally), but mostly in short-form ways.

I’m a long-form person. I make albums, not single songs. I am having a wonderful time delving into the long-form thoughts of brilliant minds, and I only wish there hadn’t been that break in the middle where I felt like I was surfing that superhighway alone.

Writing is the best, I love it, and I’m going to keep doing it. Reading is a close second.

From one solo home-working nerd to many others, I thank you for reading. 

Love,
Laura xxx

Photo by Carol Jeng.

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1. I refer you to Lucy’s footnote on this matter.
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