When was the last time you sent a letter? Not typed a text or dashed off an email but put a real pen to real paper? And Christmas cards don’t count…

Can you remember? I’m not sure either, but it was probably a birthday card, it certainly wasn’t a proper letter to a friend to just say hello. So for this week’s Calm & Collected project, I’m going to send a letter – just because. Would you like to join me?

The Beauty of Snail Mail

I have fond memories of life before text and e-mail, with boxes of teenage correspondence from my school and university days to prove it.

When I started studying at Cardiff University twenty years ago, I was assigned my first email address. But it was hardly an easy way to keep in touch: I only knew about three other people who used email and you had to go to the library to send an email.

No-one had a mobile phone and there was one solitary pay phone at the bottom of the stairs for the whole halls of residence. So I would keep in touch with friends via lots of cute postcards. The cards they sent back to me decorated the walls of my bedroom and the sight of their familiar handwriting always eased my homesickness and made me smile, in a way an email never could.

I’ve said before, that my Gran was a wonderful letter writer and could make the most mundane of weeks sound entertaining, with little snippets of news and musings written out with a blue Biro in