General Chat

Did anyone else belong to correspondence magazines? Either the round robin sort or letter to editor?

For the past 50 years I have belonged to various, some petered out but I am still in two which have been going since the 80s.

Sort of penfriends in a group often sharing a common interest. One of the ones I write to is a group of people who were all interested in walking as a hobby in the 80s. The other is all people who were born in the 40s. I did until a couple of years back belong to a gardening interest one but that folded, however I still have four individuals from that one that I write to. :-) :-) :-)

Didn't know such things existed! With the availability of internet forums, its logical that any which are still around won't be profitable for much longer.

Do you remember the international pen-friend organisations that used to be around in the 80/90's? They used to be aimed at school children so that they could improve their written foreign language skills.

Yes I remember those Det.

Correspondence magazines cost nothing to join, all they cost is your time writing the letters and the postage. I love receiving mine still, now only four letters in one but six in the other as people have unfortunately died, got too old to keep writing or got caught up with other things.

It was the 1960s that I first joined, one was for military wives and the other general. I still write to one lady from the second one, she is in her 80s now, and it was only a couple of years ago that I was writing to two others, both of whom have sadly died. When I say write, although some do still hand write the letters, most of us use the computer these days.

For my generation these were the equivalent of chat forums, somewhere to rant, to ask questions, to get support. We were nearly all young mothers when we started writing in them. There used to be a magazine that was devoted to all correspondence magazines (memory doesn't allow me to remember what it was called), that was a subscription properly printed magazine. And annually there was a big meeting of members of the mags held in London. So the forerunner of our meets!

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