“I owe you a letter” I said.

We were exchanging sad, frustrated messages, about climate change. This has been a summer of extreme heat across Europe – burning mountains and moors, empty reservoirs, record-breaking temperatures.

“Don’t ever feel you owe me a letter,” she replied.

She was right, of course. I’d expressed myself poorly. What I’d meant by “I owe you a letter” was actually “I loved receiving and reading your letter. I’m looking forward to finding an evening soon when I can sit down and take the time to write one in return.”

I live on the opposite side of the world to many of my friends. We are so lucky with the number of ways we can keep in touch. One friend I communicate with almost exclusively through WhatsApp. Not always daily, but certainly weekly. We check in and wish each other Happy Friday, or Happy Monday, good luck for the new week. Other friends I email. Others still I connect with on social media: tagging them in threads of interest, smashing the like button on photos of their kids, and enjoying the visuals of our opposite seasons – my crunchy autumn leaves always a happy companion to their spring cherry blossom.

But I am also incredibly lucky that many of my friends are still letter writers. I moved house twice before I was ten, and always kept in touch through snail mail – street names and numbers carefully noted down in my Forever Friends address book. We grew up as part of that generation where the internet only became a thing towards the end of high school, so before that we were all in the habit of writing. Over the long summer school holidays, we would send each other postcards – from Crete, Corfu, Cornwall. Sometimes we would even exchange letters in term time, for the secrets that were too precious to whisper in the echoing staircases and corridors of school.

I have no idea how we made such stories out of our mundane teenage lives. We are not talking letters that were a quick scribble. We’re talking 10, 15, sometimes even 20 pages of text, written with our newest fluorescent gel pens, often with pictures in the margins.

Perhaps there was more material than I remember. These were the years of school discos and driving tests, sleepovers and exam results, Body Shop limited releases and glittery Miss Selfridge nail varnish. A significant sighting of your current crush in the dining hall could sustain several paragraphs. We had parents and siblings to complain about, homework to compare, song lyrics to obsess over and tiny shifts in friendship groups to analyse with the seriousness of international diplomacy. No wonder we needed twenty pages.

We have moved beyond that now. Well, most of it. The stationery is probably better these days. The handwriting may be worse. But the basic premise hasn’t changed very much: here is what is happening in my life; tell me what is happening in yours.

The thing about letters is that they require focused attention, half an hour where you concentrate on nothing else. Perhaps because of that, it seems to be where we still discuss the more serious aspects of our lives in detail. We know the day-to-day nonsense, that’s what social media is for. And urgent, unexpected things get dealt with digitally.

But when a topic requires thoughtful consideration, when the physical act of writing it out can help our own thoughts – considerations of marriage, pregnancy, house moves or a job change – it’s in a letter that it usually comes out.

There’s something useful, too, about the delay. A letter from Tasmania to the UK takes long enough that there’s no point filling it with questions that need an immediate answer. By the time my friend reads about the thing I was worrying about on a Sunday evening, it will likely already have resolved itself. The difficult conversation might have happened. The decision might have been made. The crisis might have turned out not to be a crisis after all.

But that doesn’t make the letter redundant. If anything, it makes it a little snapshot of where I was at that particular moment – what was occupying my thoughts, what I was excited about, what I couldn’t quite make sense of yet.

And then, eventually, something comes back. There are few things that make me happier than checking the mailbox and seeing an envelope with handwriting I recognise. Before I’ve even checked the postmark, I know who it’s from. Usually, I put it aside until I have time to read it properly, because opening a letter while standing at the kitchen bench between unloading the dishwasher and feeding the dog feels somehow wrong. A letter deserves a cup of tea. It deserves a comfy chair. It deserves ten minutes in which I’m not simultaneously wondering whether I remembered to put milk and eggs on the shopping list.

Perhaps that is what I meant when I said I owed my friend a letter. Not that there was an unpaid debt sitting between us, or that somewhere on the other side of the world she was tapping her fingers impatiently and wondering why I hadn’t replied.

I meant that I wanted to give her the same thing she had given me: a little pocket of undivided attention. Half an hour in which I would sit at my desk, choose one of the nice cards or sheets of paper I am forever buying and never have enough reasons to use, and think about nothing very much except her.

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Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

P.S. I’ve no idea what has unleashed this FLOOD of nostalgia-tinged blog posts recently after years of very infrequent posting. Perhaps some kind of stubborn refusal to let the machines have a monopoly on creating. Sorry, if you’re still reading. I’m sure it’ll dry up again soon…