Dear Mum

We have been watching Long Lost Family, a TV program in which people are helped to find lost or unknown members of their family. Participants often write to their lost person before they actually meet, and I have been interested to see how often those letters are written on pages torn out of spiral notebooks, like the one in the photo.
 
I suppose lots of people no longer possess an old fashioned writing pad – remember Basildon Bond? A search of my desk retrieved an ‘onion skin’ airmail pad which I used for writing home when I first moved to Australia. I think it must be forty years old. I also have hundreds of blue aerogramme letters from my mother and family in England. Aerogrammes could be a challenge. They had a fixed amount of space, so if it wasn’t enough you ended up doing cross writing, like a Victorian lady. On the other hand you could find yourself scratching for something to say on that wretched extra bit of space on the back.
 
Nowadays, for me writing a letter is likely to mean an email or a WhatsApp. The nearest I get to a real letter is to type or dictate the letter and then print it out, on office paper. It’s really not quite the same as sitting down with pad and pen.