I recently read ‘To the Letter – a journey through a vanishing world’ by Simon Garfield. It’s far from the best book I’ve read all year, but it caught my eye when I saw a review in the Gulf News, and it was a subject that I was interested in. Should we still be writing personal letters? One of the unexpected benefits of reading the book was discovering great letter writers of old. What makes letters special I think is their very personal quality, and I found it remarkable reading letters from the 18th century (esp. Chesterfield) and love letters from World War Two (which are scattered throughout the book). You can sense the very human nature of their authors. Despite it being an obvious truth, we so easily dismiss people in the past as being of a very different species, but letters more than anything highlight just how real they were. When we fall in love we think it’s the most magical unrepeatable experience, but it’s actually something that’s been felt a hundred million times by other people. It also shows how many of the ideas we think original have long ago been expressed and thought up. Nothing under the sun has not already appeared.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, but I do feel there was a time when my email inbox was full of messages from real friends, which is so rarely the case now; it’s all mailing lists and Google Alerts. I don’t think that’s just because I’ve moved overseas. Part of my motivation for reading the book was to know if I should do more letter writing and if the form is possible with email. The author seems to think letter writing is dying out, though he does say that people have been saying this for centuries. Physical letters do give you something that’s imminently keep-able. I do hope to start a ‘tiny letter’ soon though.