Dear Letter,

I couldn’t let another day pass without telling you how much I have been thinking of you this week... You have been unjustly ignored for years but suddenly, thanks to a poorly written letter from the pen of our poorly sighted Prime Minister, you have been catapulted back into the front line – the place you occupied for so long until your saucy young cousin Email came to usurp your place in our lives. Now only older people use pen and paper to communicate with the outside world – the rest of us tap away on a keyboard fast and often thoughtlessly.

I hope you realise that only good can come of this furore. The rackety debate around Gordon Brown’s handwriting is a sideshow even if his misspelling of Mrs Janes’ name is not. The wider role of the Sun and the shifting sands of political affiliations of the media is not your problem.

But the message that significant letters really cannot be sent by email, that we have a Prime Minister who writes to every mother of every soldier who gives his life for his country, can only be good for both the sender and the letter itself. While Brown basks in the watery sunshine of greater public approval, I hope that the letter will also regain its place as the only way that emotions as various and personal as grief, condolence, rupture and love can be adequately expressed. Letters create a sense of occasion – and if losing a child is not a life-changing occasion then nothing is worth anything.

A letter honours both the recipient and the writer, it focuses the mind to write and frames our emotions. We keep them. The optimistic and affectionate letters from Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid to his wife Christina in the last weeks of his life will be a great source of pride and comfort to her – and a permanent memorial to his love, integrity and bravery. If we were to try to live our lives as if every day were our last, we should be writing letters all the time if we do not want to leave our loved ones with little more than email exchanges about the nitty gritty of life.

But now letter writing is confined to exceptional circumstances. The well mannered will write thanks - the bread and butter letter - but the great majority of us only use it rarely. It has, for instance, become a central plank of therapy. Tell a tormented soul to write a letter to a dead parent, or an abusive spouse, and a floodgate of suppressed emotion lets rip. It is a form of communication with our own souls.

So I wish you well and I hope your future is much brighter than your recent past.

With fond love Emma