A hazy recollection of my first ever email… or so I think.

Pegasus and Me

Writers notes: I’m getting into the practice of writing, scribbling and voice noting as the mood takes me. I was inspired to write this piece after my MIL expressed surprise at my amazing memory…as you’ll see I’m not sure how much is memory and how much is story. This is from a journal entry while in The Netherlands.

And so we begin.

29th May 2025, Terschelling

We arrived in The Netherlands last night, well yesterday lunchtime, but by the time we were with Erik’s parents it was a round 5pm - that’s evening right?

After a lovely meal out, we were back home, drinking wine, snacking on, well, snacks, and chatting, as usual, when we started talking about tech and the exceptionally rapid advances we’re now seeing.

Mum asked “Can you imagine what it will be like in 10 years time?”

“No” I answered, “I could never have imagined where we are now, even 5 years ago, and I’m not sure I can imagine 2 years into the future let alone 10!”

Unless it’s all gone to the dogs and the machines have taken over, now that I can imagine. I almost want to see it…

I then started to regale, yes regale, Erik’s parents about the first email I sent, explaining that when 18 year old Hannah sat at a dusty desktop 27 years ago, little could she imagine her daily life would be governed by technology, that she would always be online and that in 2025 she could easily have a more sensible conversation with Artificial Intelligence, than she ever could her brothers.

Ssh, don’t tell her brothers, good job they don’t both subscribe! Hi boys…

Let’s go back.

The year was 1997, the month October. How do I know? It’s pretty simple really, it was my first year in Uni and it was part of our induction. It must have been our first computer session and up to that point the most time I’d spent on a computer was either playing Sonic on the Sega Mega Drive or one of the handful of computers in our computer lab at school. I have no recollection of accessing the internet back then and I think the snazziest bit of tech we had was the CD-Rom in the library, but to this day I’m still not entirely sure what it did. Perhaps I’ll look it up one day, or ask Chat, or Claude, or Gemini or one of them.

I can’t remember exactly which building we were in, but I know it was King’s Buildings, the science campus at Edinburgh University. It could’ve been the library building or maybe even my home for the next 4 years, the Scottish Agricultural College. It was most certainly an ugly 1960/70s building, not one of the fancy ones you see in town. You see, the scientist, and engineers, were hidden out of sight a good couple of miles away from the main campus. The fancy campus was reserved for arts and humanities. People like us didn’t need beauty apparently and of course medical and veterinary students got to enjoy the nicer buildings and location. It was just us nerds that got pushed out into the periphery.

Not nearly as dingy a room as the one I remember, but you get the gist? Photo credit: benedek from Getty Images Signature

I also don’t remember all the finer details, but what I do recall is the abject fascination I felt. My brother had given me a brief introduction into the world of electronic mail, but it still bent my brain. Letters by computer, travelling invisibly through the ether all the way from Edinburgh to whoever I decided to send an email to. Ha! Whoever I decided to send an email to, as if, there was only one person - said brother. He is 4 years older than me and was in his final year at Loughborough University so had been long introduced to the wonders of email. He’d given me his email address before I left as he knew I’d be given the opportunity to send him emails, whether he chose to reply to them or not would be another matter. As it turns out, I spent most of that year going out and having fun, barely able to string a sentence together much rather type an email and so we didn’t communicate often.

We were a small group of students with a slightly balding middle-aged Computer Science lecturer taking us through the process. There were rows upon rows of desks with clunky monitors, clacking keyboards and temperamental mice, while under the desk massive hot, whirring computers did their work.

The moment that sticks with me most, was opening Pegasus Mail app and watching the winged horse grow larger on my screen until it had loaded and I was faced with endless possibilities. OK, not endless, but it felt exciting.

This rather hunky version of Pegasus is courtesy of CoreyFord from Getty Images

As I said, my experiences with tech up to this point had been limited, so put me in a dark dusty computer lab and open up the world of email and I was away. It gets hazy after that, but I know with almost 100% certainty that my first email was sent to my brother, he was the only person I knew with an email address after all.

This memory is so ingrained in me and it’s a story I remind myself of time and again. Why? Because I love email. Yes, I sometimes think it might be the death of me but what a bloody useful tool. It’s been 27 years and I still think it’s marvellous. You can send messages, attachments and links to things. They can be filed away, attachments saved and you can set up rules to categorise and file them. These days I even have project management tool integrated with it so I can create tasks based on my emails. And my favourite thing, no-one knows if you’re read it or not. I know some people put read receipts on, this is not on at all and if it’s something you do, stop immediately, but you can always say no to sending a receipt. Ha, in your face former director.

WhatsApp, text messages, social media messages…they all have that annoying setting where they show the person on the other end of the conversation whether you’ve read it or not. It allows no time for mulling, and I like to mull. I also like to prioritise and it’s easier to do with emails.

Looking back on it now I wish I had a copy of that first email. What did it say and was it really to my brother, or was it to someone else in the class? Did we all send the same email to a mailbox created just for that purpose. Maybe, but I am 95% sure that my first real email, to a real person, was to him.

I’m getting less sure now. Oh wow do I wish I’d saved it.

As I was reliving my ‘first email’ memory with Erik’s parents, his Mum expressed astonishment at my ability to remember, and I said “I remember because it’s my story, or at least the story that I remember.”

I’ve told myself that exact story again and again and again. So many times that it is now my truth, but did it happen exactly like that (hazy parts excepted), I don’t know. And that’s the other truth.

It got me thinking more about stories and how easy it is to mix our story and truth. Or rather, how hard it is to know what truth is.

We know facts, or at least we think we do, and if we can record them accurately, then maybe that helps. But even then, the human part gets in the way. Because every person in a situation remembers it differently, they felt it differently.

So what are we left with? A version.

And this is my version of the story that is my first ever email.

I’ve made a not so bold decision this week that I am going to write for the sake of writing, the very reason I came to Substack in the first place, before I got caught up in the numbers and the idea of paid subscriptions. What I hope this will do is allow me to write more without overthinking every post and wondering what category it fits into.

You just get me. Yikes…for more me, if you’re not already, subscribe here ⬇️