Always & Forever script lettering design

I'm writing this on the back of a bus timetable because my biro ran dry somewhere past the Kelvin Hall, and the last 2:14 to the depot is the only thing still moving on Argyle Street. You'll tell me I should have rung. The box outside Central has been out of order since Easter, so a letter it is, the slow way, which I suspect you'd prefer anyway.

We cleared Eamon's back room on Tuesday. Forty years of sign-writing, and most of it went in the skip: gold leaf for shopfronts that have since turned into vape shops, brushes stiff as cat whiskers. In the drawer under the bench I found a card the size of a playing card, and on it, in that looping hand he never let anyone else touch, the words Always & Forever. It was never a commission. Nobody ordered it. He'd worked the ampersand three or four times, each one a little more ridiculous than the last, the way he got when he was happy.

I stood under the sodium light on Renfield Street with the card in my glove and thought about Agnes, who could never read his capitals and always pretended she could. He used to say the trick with a script was to make it look easy to read after you'd spent an hour making sure it was. I think about that a lot now.

I've put the card in this envelope. Don't frame it. Hold it up to a window when the light's coming in and see whether the thin hairlines still meet the way he meant them to.

Love, Kath