It was written on pink paper and it came in a pink envelope whose Canadian stamps were printed with pictures of flowers. Perhaps the paper smelled faintly of perfume and the salutation was ‘Dearest Jonathan’. My ballet dancer friend could have sent an e-mail but it would have looked just the same as any other e-mail, perfume would have been out of the question, and the salutation might well have been the ubiquitous and tedious ‘Hi’.
    We have taken letters for granted for so long  yet still seem in awe of the cleverness of the e-mail. But when you think about it, the letter too, is remarkably clever. An ICBM can find its target on the other side of the world with what is called pinpoint (actually an exaggeration) accuracy. But the missile uses supremely clever and expensive high technology, while the technology that drives my letter from Toronto is so low as to be hardly there at all. Furthermore, its accuracy really is pinpoint, or, at least, letterbox-point. And to hit a letterbox with a small piece of paper after a journey of three and a half thousand miles is a damn sight  better than darts, and no-one is shouting ‘One Hundred and Eighty’. Also, had my ballet dancer omitted a full stop in the address, or a comma, the postman would not have got all petulant, stamped his foot and refused to deliver it. But the virtual e-mail postman would. He is the union shop-steward whose relentless adherence to the rules has destroyed his imagination and his humanity. The e-mail too, is in danger of destroying imagination. I’m not anti e-mail, I write them all the time, but for anything important there is no substitute for the letter.
    Today we seem obsessed, like the National Trust, with ‘heritage’. Heritage used to refer to inheritance but it has now become a noun used to describe an industry dealing with nostalgia. Too frequently it is to do with preventing artefacts from changing, fading, maturing and, therefore, preventing them from living, and yet we are beginning to deny ourselves the existence of letters. Many of us have a box of letters somewhere that are all that remains of someone we once loved. Those of us who are lucky to have such a box, or something tied with a ribbon, can harmlessly indulge from time to occasional time in the pleasure of re-reading and re-living. A picture may be worth a thousand words but a letter is worth a thousand pictures.
    There are two other reasons why letter writing should be preserved.
    What about future biographers? How much biographical research is research of correspondence? And how many volumes of letters are there on library shelves? Without turning my head I can see Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald (and it isn’t only crazy women who write revealing and lovely letters). Letters can tell us so very much about people. Whether we as outsiders have a right to this archive is a debatable moral point and one I am not concerned with but I do know that without letters, whether written by the rich, the literary or the ordinary, the lives of the rest of us would be impoverished. Will anyone bother to print and keep copies of e-mails? I doubt it. And I doubt also that the rumours that all electronically generated information is being saved somewhere in the ether will aid its accessibility.
    Finally, as someone who draws pictures with words and who writes with pictures, I would be saddened by the potential loss of accidental artwork. In the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library I love to look at pages from what are, essentially, notebooks and working drawings by writers and musicians. Work which by definition was not intended, necessarily, for public view yet which offers great reward for the rest of us – drafts by Handel, John Lennon, Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Angela Carter. This is great stuff and most of it, if it were produced to-day, probably would not survive beyond the keyboard. But we can at least, by writing letters, ensure that some of this survives. But the really important thing is that  letter writing gives pleasure to others, while the e-mail gives information.