TESTIMONY

IT is generally thought that writing was developed as an aid to commerce. Like the letter sent to the merchant Ea-nasir in about 1750 BC, complaining about his inferior copper.

The tablet hardened over the centuries and the complaint is now engraved and etched in stone in the British Museum.

If the businessman who wrote the letter had known this would be how the world remembered him, might he have been tempted to write something else?

Most of our written communications tend to be electronic these days. Ephemeral. How about bucking that trend and writing something on paper or card a reader might think worth preserving?

I will leave it to you to decide which words you use, but I envisage and can only guess they won’t be complaining ones.