Here are some thoughts of mine about writing letters.

1. I like the idea that two faraway strangers can contact each other. When I was younger I read A Series of Unfortunate Events and wrote a short letter to Lemony Snicket. I was surprised when he sent me a reply inviting me round for tea.

2. The postal service is brilliant. You can stick a stamp on just about anything and someone will carry it to wherever you want it. I worked in a mail room once and when I got bored I used to mail bits of fruit – apples, bananas, grapes, to someone I didn’t know very well who lived in France.

3. I like email a lot. I don’t think that letters are better than emails, but… in some ways they are better, because you can do things with a letter that you can’t do with email (yet):

– You can write and draw and stop and start a letter.

– Nobody expects you to reply immediately.

– You can shove anything into a letter – a receipt, a wrapper, a feather, a flower.

– You can spray a letter so it smells of something (I once smeared some Marmite on a letter so my friend could see what it tasted like).

– You can use interesting paper to write on.

– You can use or make weird envelopes.

– You can hide letters in surprising places so they’re found later on.

4. Writing a good letter requires a special kind of concentration.

5. I’m bad at writing letters. I get bored of myself quite quickly. When that happens I stop writing and do something else, and I come back to the letter later. Sometimes my letters start and stop a dozen times. They end up as a series of beginnings of letters. Most of the time I never post them, lose them, and then find them years later: a little bundle of abandoned letter beginnings.

6. I think letters should be kept and framed instead of put away in drawers. When you write a letter well, and someone enjoys reading it, they can keep it and treasure it. I have a friend called Derrick who writes the best letters. To receive a Derrick letter is a real event. He works in forests and writes me letters on maps so that I can see where he’s been. I keep everything he sends me. I have one of his letters framed on my wall, with all its different parts spread out, like the parts of a clock.

7. Derrick again – the last letter Derrick sent me looked like this. See what I mean? It’s like treasure. Even the stamps he used are great. Reading it made me feel like we were speaking to each other. As well as the letter, he wrote a list of  songs he’d been listening to recently. I listened to a few of them afterwards.

Those are some of my thoughts about letters. And here are the songs Derrick had been listening to. I recommend the Kiha and the Faces one