CHRISTMAS WEEK LETTER-WRITING—IS IT WORTH THE TIME AND THE EFFORT? ABSOLUTELY!
If I had my way, I’d move Christmas to February—largely because I rarely seem to be quite ready for Christmas (and one tends to need cheering up in the February/March period). True, there is St. Patrick’s Day, but that is only a single day which never quite does it for me.
Christmas Day seems to sort of sneak up before I’m fully organized to do all the good things I want to do. Quite how I can say that given the excessive commercialization of the whole season, I don’t know, but I blame it on my dyslexia and my general problem with dates and time. Somehow I don’t see such things in a conventional way. My sense of time is somewhat strange, I am told—though I find it agreeable enough.
Socializing, gift giving and the religious side apart—not that religion seems to play much of a role these days—my great pleasure in life is writing to people over Christmas . Yes, it is ridiculously time consuming, and hard work, but it is marvelous to hear back from people you value, but might otherwise never see—particularly because they are scattered all over the world. This globalization thing has got out of hand in my opinion. I got a Christmas call from China this year.
Facebook seems to be the gold standard for social communication, but I value the relative privacy of an individual e-mail. And most people reply to them in whole sentences and throw in some news into the bargain. In this age of texting, whole sentences are an endangered species, but I remain rather fond of them.
He is the son of an old friend, Professor Jonathan Levie, Director of Knowledge Exchange
Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship University of Strathclyde.
Jonathan—a delightful human being—and I go way to the days when I was trying to create jobs in Ireland. In fact, he has used my efforts as a case history ever since. He also used to have me in to University College, Cork to lecture his students on a guest basis. I enjoyed the role greatly and once asked him could I perhaps get a job lecturing at UCC.
“You’re too controversial,” he said.
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