It had been a quiet few days for Hungry Paul since his Yahtzee conversation with Leonard, quiet days not being uncommon in his schedule. This had given him the opportunity to ponder the expansion and contraction of the universe as observed in localised form in the life of his best friend. Edwin Hubble, had he looked inside Leonard with his telescope, would have recorded that everything was just as the universe would ordain it. The thing is, for Hungry Paul the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of its complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was otherwise best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing. Though his life had been largely quiet and uneventful, his choices had turned out to be wise ones: he had already lived longer than Alexander the Great, and had fewer enemies, too. But he had now become awakened by the thought that, no matter how insignificant he was when compared to the night sky, he remained subject to the same elemental forces of expansion. The universe, it seemed, would eventually come knocking. And so it was that over a mid-morning scone he read a short article in the local freesheet with a sense of cosmic destiny.
The Community Voice was a paper delivered door-to-door on the generous interpretation that it was excused from the ‘no junk mail’ signs on the letterboxes of the community it voiced. Typically there was a picture of an old woman or young child in a wheelchair on the front page, holding up what we would be led to believe was a disingenuous letter from the Council. The outraged headline usually left limited room for the reader to draw alternative conclusions. Inside there were blatant advertisements presented as articles, pictures of medals being presented, an advice column from the local doctor, and a helpful chart showing which bins were to be collected on which Mondays, alternating between refuse and recyclables.
The article that caught Hungry Paul’s interest had been written by the Chamber of Commerce, a group that he assumed had some relationship to the Chamber of Horrors at the wax museum, presumably displaying wax likenesses of entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson or Uncle Ben. The article posed what Hungry Paul considered to be a very modern quandary. In the world as we know it today, including in the business world where everything is more so, communication was now primarily conducted through email. Years of effort spent teaching the greatest business minds how to write template letters was coming undone, as the art of expression had not kept pace with technological developments. A lexicon of classic phrases, once thought perennial, was now facing obsolescence. The writer of the article—a Mr H. Means, Community Affairs Editor—had given the whole thing quite a bit of thought:
‘To whom it may concern’ has a certain letter-in-a-bottle sound to it, in that it seeks to engage the reader without specifying, or attempting to find out, their name, surname, title, gender or position. It also leaves open the possibility that the letter may not be relevant to the reader at all; the ‘may’ suggesting that this might all be the wildest of goose chases after the loosest of gooses.
‘Dear Sir or Madam’ was originally agonised over as a concession made by the leather-bound gentlemen’s clubs towards the inevitable possibility that some important letters were read by women. The either/or approach here also unintentionally opens the possibility that the recipient could decide to read the letter one day as a man and the next as a woman. In any event, as nobody is called ‘Sir’ these days, unless by a shop assistant who is unlikely to hold their customers in any sincere esteem, and addressing someone as a ‘Madam’ is preposterously formal to the point of stageyness, there is little of the phrase that is above criticism. Even ‘Dear’ suggests a letter between two darlings about to open their hearts in an epistolary confession; such a scenario is unlikely to have ever been common between affiliates of the Chamber of Commerce.
The real problem is a common perplexity and awkwardness around how to sign-off emails. In formal letters, ‘yours faithfully’ has been used by the Chamber of Commerce whenever the addressee is not identified, although some members feel that its suggestion of fidelity is somewhat at odds with the anonymous salutation: in effect they have been saying, ‘You have my undying loyalty, whoever you are.’ It was already amended once during the 1950s, when ‘I remain, yours faithfully’ was shortened because of complaints about its toady flirtatiousness. ‘Yours sincerely’ was also a problem for some members who felt that an express statement of sincerity implied that they were the type of correspondent who was routinely disbelieved.
Emails, with their aspiration of chatty informality, have allowed local businesses to use more light-hearted sign-offs, none of which has made the leap from acceptability to satisfactoriness as far as the Chamber of Commerce is concerned.
‘Regards’ is the most common one, but some feel that it is a limp-wristed, lukewarm ‘this’ll do’ type of sign-off. The phrase had actually started out as ‘Regards to the wife and kids’ but this was shortened by the Chamber many years ago as it moved with the times.
By way of international comparison, it is worth pointing out that in the United States of America, where they like their business correspondence to be snappy and rude, they have abandoned stuffy sign-offs altogether. Most letters and emails over there now end with the phrase ‘Am I right or am I right?’
According to the article, all of this had the Chamber of Commerce in such a state that it had decided to throw it open to the public to see if they had any better ideas. In fact, they were holding a competition to identify a new sign-off that would be used by its members nationwide in all business correspondence. There was a cheque for ten grand and a statuette up for grabs. Hungry Paul, who had never had either, immediately recognised what was an almost vocational voice saying that he should enter.
Given that all good ideas have a natural buoyancy that forces them to the surface, he couldn’t help raising it when Leonard was over later that evening for a four-player game of Scrabble with Helen and Peter, which had become something of a Sunday night ritual that helped to lighten that night-before-school feeling. Helen and Peter had played Scrabble for years, going back to when they first bought a house together and had no money to go out. They used to play high stakes games of Scrabble, with the loser providing carnal favours to the victor, a system which allowed them to explore both their vocabulary and their marriage at the same time. Naturally, this led to a certain sauciness in the choice of words played, with the result that triple word scores were sometimes foregone in favour of lower-scoring but more titillating alternatives. Once they became parents, this charming in-joke fell into abeyance, though they continued to keep board games (in their intended form) and the playing of them as a part of their household family routine.
The game on this particular evening, however, was somewhat frustrating, as four-player games often are, owing to the inability to plan more than one move at a time. Helen complained bitterly that Peter kept taking the spaces she had her eye on. Peter kept asking ‘Is it my go?’ unable to follow the complex sequence of turns among the four players, which went neither clockwise nor anti-clockwise, but was based on when players’ birthdays occurred in a calendar year—a contrivance put in place years before to stop family rows about seating arrangements. Leonard seemed to get nothing but vowels all evening, which was neither good for him nor for anyone who needed them. Hungry Paul, as ever, was the referee with the battered Scrabble word book and a dictionary at his side. Some years ago, in response to what became known as the ‘Za incident’, they had introduced a house rule that you had to be able to explain the word you were using. Hungry Paul operated this rule with iron inflexibility, even though he himself was its most frequent victim, which surely speaks to his innate sense of fairness.
At one stage, following a controversial toilet break, Hungry Paul broached the topical issue of the day regarding the Chamber of Commerce, igniting the interest of all those present. Straight away there began an outpouring of spuriously relevant ideas. While Helen confessed to using such banalities as ‘Take Care’ and ‘Talk to you soon,’ Peter said he was more austere in his habits and signed off simply as ‘Peter,’ in the style of such single-name legends as Morrissey and Prince. Peter and Helen then disappeared into their own married little wormhole about the length of his sign-off, making each other laugh with in-jokes that Hungry Paul was sure were only superficially clean. Leonard, ever the deep thinker, was provoked into a moment of reflection about how he signed off his own emails. He usually used ‘Regards’ but could immediately see its shortcomings. As he seemed to be the only one still taking the game of Scrabble seriously, a game he was losing, he took up the topic with some keenness.
‘I think you’re on to something there. I mean, technology has moved on so much and is now ubiquitous, so there must be a whole galaxy of communication conventions that need to be updated. Greetings, salutations, sign-offs, auto-replies, the lot. You don’t even need a phrase that makes sense, you just need something that sounds right; after all, that is how it has worked up to now.’
‘I like something friendly. Emails and texts are all so cold and impersonal. You need something to brighten the whole thing up,’ said Helen.
‘Darling, these are business people. You can’t go suggesting emojis, smiley faces and the like. Why not go the whole hog and just wipe jam on the letters and write your age including half years at the end?’ said Peter, joking recklessly and, in doing so, unwittingly exiting the good books he had just flirted his way into.
‘If you won you could copyright the phrase and then earn some cash every time it was used. Even a small royalty per letter would add up if everyone uses it,’ suggested Leonard.
‘I’m not looking to make money from this. I want to contribute to society. Make a difference. That sort of thing.’ Hungry Paul’s pious clarification sent a shiver around the room.
‘You could just give the money to charity,’ suggested Leonard, not giving up on his idea easily.
At this Hungry Paul almost dropped his consonants. ‘That’s fundraising, not charity. Totally separate things. Charity transforms both giver and receiver for the better. It is rightly described as a virtue. Fundraising or donating to charity and all the other variations on that theme are something else: a tangle of mixed motivations and results, some good, some questionable. I want to make a clean, straight contribution to the world. Nothing sullied. Nothing that takes explaining. So no fundraising.’
During his working day Leonard was perennially in the role of unrequited suggester but found this negative feedback surprisingly hurtful, coming as it did from his dear friend and outside of business hours. Peter gave him a little look of support as if to say that he agreed with him even if Hungry Paul didn’t, though he meant it more as an endorsement of the concept of market forces generally than of Leonard’s idea specifically.
Just as the conversation was in danger of descending to the standard of a daytime phone-in show, where people outdo each other to come up with ever more banal angles on the topic, the landline rang with what everyone correctly assumed was Grace’s latest round of updates and indecisions. Helen answered it and settled into the couch with her legs folded under herself, very much with the look of someone who was going to be occupied for some time to come. While it is theoretically possible to convert a four-player game into a three-player game, it is something that is just not done in the Scrabble world, and so the game was quietly abandoned without any attempt to tally who had been ahead.
There was a round of yawns and stretches, checking of watches and all those other unconscious preambles to the announcement of the evening’s conclusion. Leonard cited the busyness of the day ahead of him tomorrow, which was neither true nor untrue, but as the visitor among the group he felt a greater onus to justify his exit. Hungry Paul would be up early the next morning on the off-chance of a call from the Post Office to do the Monday morning shift. Peter had no particular plans, but was used to feeling widowed by these regular calls from Grace and was keen to do something worthwhile with the balance of the evening.
Hungry Paul let Leonard out, joining him in the driveway for a brief scan of the universe to see if Jupiter and Mercury were visible that evening, which they were. They left each other with an understated goodbye, which is typical for friends who see each other regularly, as not all friends do.
Hungry Paul went in and filled himself a pint glass of water for his bedside, his stockinged feet cold on the tiles, and climbed the stairs to his room. Lying in bed, with one leg outside the sheets for coolness, Hungry Paul felt the ghost of inspiration enter the room. As he lay there on the threshold between reflection and sleep, an idea came to him from that special place that ideas come from. Swivelling to his left, he reached for the stumpy pencil on his bedside table and wrote out his competition entry in one perfect draft.