Love letters etc.

I wrote a letter the other day. Not of itself anything to write home about. (Although as it happens, I was writing home – to my girlfriend.) But it struck me, at about the same time a crippling cramp gripped my entire hand a mere six lines in, that I could not remember the last time I wrote Sam a proper letter. Having grown lazily over-reliant on word processing and spelchek, I started sentences I didn't really know how to finish, agonised over the simplest of words I'd forgotten how to spell. The arthritic pain that shot through my hand was the very opposite of Repetitive Strain Injury: it had seized up through under use. It had been so long, my hand and I had forgotten how to do it.

Thing is, I was the quite the Cyrano de Bergerac in my adolescence (except with a slightly smaller nose). My often tortured prose was as florid as my hand – flowing streams of self-consciousness in royal blue fountain pen ink, the juvenile handwriting morphing from one style to quite another, often within the space of a single epistle.

Last year my parents moved out of the family home to a smaller place and insisted I come and pack up the time capsule of childhood that was my old bedroom, "Otherwise the whole lot is going to the tip." I am a hoarder so there were plenty of dusty exhibits in this museum of youth to pore through, and many of them were difficult to throw away. Secreted in the forgotten recesses of my wardrobe, I came across a locked metal box-file labelled "Love Letters etc." I found the rusty key to my past in my old piggybank and the box burst open to reveal a fan of mail: a concertinaed, anally alphabetised outpouring of pent-up emotion.

It was an impressively heavy box, weighed down with adorable heartfelt 4 EVA declarations of eternal adoration that lasted two months and the cringe-worthy teenage angst of unrequited love letters I wrote but mercifully thought better of sending.

There was my first ever Valentine's, a padded card from Verity Sinclair, in which she had simply drawn VS 4 DR inside a heart with an arrow going through it. We were eight. There was a short-lived series of childish letters from a holiday romance by the name of Jane – my first kiss – smudged with lipstick, cheap scent and innocence. She Facebooked me recently, our first contact in – ooh, let's think – 15 years? I haven't replied. Later on there was a more earnest correspondence with Lisa that started off saccharine-sweet only to sour into a plaintive final plea to salvage the relationship. She signed off "I love you" but crossed it out deliberately so that I could read between the lines. I did. 

Writing heartfelt letters is in my blood. While going through my grandfather's papers shortly after his death a few years ago, I came across an old letter, jaundiced with age, that he wrote to my grandmother while he was away on business for just one night. Reading it was to be transported to another time when communication was at once more formal and yet more personal, candid, romantic. The writing was beautiful, both to look at and to read, and I found myself moved to tears. Love letters have the capacity to do that in a way that drunken text messages you cannot remember sending and Facebook pokes just don't.

Sitting on my bedroom floor, retracing my own long lost inker trail, it occurred to me that the handwritten letter is a dying art form of communication. You can read someone's mind in a handwritten letter through the care and time they have or have not taken, the neatness of the script, the choice of stationery. This level of subtlety – of more sophisticated meta-language, of saying much more than simply words – is lost in the comparatively blunt and thoughtless immediacy of texts and emails and Superwall messages.

When was the last time you received a love letter? And when was the last time you sent one? In these days of chip and pin, we barely even write our names anymore. We press computer and mobile phone keyboards 2 cmunac8. The US postal service is blaming the increasing use of email for its current financial woes. According to a recent UK survey, fewer than half of boys and just under a third of girls aged 16 to 19 have ever written a letter of any sort. If they tried to do the same survey here, the kids might struggle to fill out the questionnaire. To whomever it may concern: The noble art of letter writing is sadly coming to a full stop. Yours sincerely, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

So I'm bringing de Bergerac back. And for the first time in years, I've got a writer's lump to prove it – that ink-stained fleshy indent on the third finger that snugly accommodates a pen like a squashed cushion.

I had a go at writing my first love letter to Sam the other day when I was away from home for a week. I used a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck fountain pen and Smythson of Bond Street cartridge paper and everything. But I didn't make a terribly good fist of it to be honest: it felt awkward and self-conscious and – ahSHITthatHURTS – it gave me cramp. Nevertheless it moved her to tears and she said she's going to keep it forever.

Time to get a new box-file.