A tribute to the lost art of letter writing

There are many good reasons, we’re constantly told, for millennials and Generation Z to resent their elders. What they can barely imagine, we took for granted: affordable housing, state-paid education, free dentistry and slow, misspent youths on unemployment benefit. But there is another justification for their envy, one that is hardly ever mentioned: we wrote letters to each other.

Mine was the very last generation to do so. Bleak and empty was the day you didn’t find a stuffed envelope, in handwriting you recognised, waiting for you on the doormat. As well as being a sign you weren’t forgotten, letters could, at their best, be sources of sheer delight. Many went on for pages – it wasn’t unusual to find five folded sheets inside, written on both sides. There were sad letters, angry letters, adoring letters, funny letters, confessional letters, admonishing letters, guarded letters, letters which expected you to ‘read between the lines’.