The only New Year's Resolution I made - other than the one resolution not to make any - was to invest in a new address book, and I have been occupied with the somewhat saddening task of copying out names and adresses from the old.
It's a very old book indeed, since it accompanied me in all my travels around and around and around the world for more than thirty years. Who were all those people crammed into the pages of this battered old book? Every page is absolutely jam-packed with names and numbers, sometimes underlined or with marginal notations 'See page so-and-so'.
There are names that belong to boat voyages, or train travels, or hotel encounters; people who seemed so charming that one promised to 'keep in touch'. I never offered them to 'look in and see me if you are passing through' as I usually was, as they say, of no fixed abode which spared me a lot of trouble as they were absolute strangers with whom I had nothing in common except a shared voyage or some talk in a bar or dining room.
Of course, there are some names and addresses that I am transcribing into my new book that belong to people who were once just passers-by or brief encounters somewhere, but who have come to justify the word 'friend' and have gone on meaning that through many years of absence.
With email and the internet, it's now much easier to keep in touch, and also to know when no longer to keep in touch, such as when one's email is returned with the mail delivery message 'mailbox for user is full'. It probably means that an old friend has gone 'off-line', metaphorically or, more likely, physically, and no amount of emailing will reach him again.
Perhaps future death certificates should include an instruction to shut down the email account so as to remove any doubt in a sender's mind.
