I was looking through a drawer today stuffed with letters from my mother, with whom I corresponded regularly from the time I left home to go to school in 1961 until she died in 1994.

Emily and I have also kept a basket full of our correspondence during the time we were going to school in different places in the two years before we got married.

It's already a cliche that younger people will have no such written archives of their lives to thumb through in their later years, even if they do manage to store it electronically. Historians will not have diaries and letters available to them that have brought past figures to life for contemporary readers for hundreds of years. Of course, they will have blogs and other electronic correspondence that has already tripped up an amazingly large number of politicians and criminals who seem to forget that emails can also have a long life. But still, it's not as permanent a record as something printed or as ink on paper. I, of course, bemoan the decline of correspondence by print and letter, which is related to the decline of newspaper readership.

However, Janice told me today that almost 200 people are following this blog on a daily basis and I realize how important the Internet can be in bringing people together, albeit in a more fleeting fashion than letters.

My mother is one of those people who could almost hear the coins drop as the charges increased according to the length of a long-distance call. I'm not sure she ever could have adjusted to the telecommunications revolution. But I am pretty sure that she would have been a huge fan of email, being able to keep in touch with a large number of people quickly and efficiently and getting sometimes an almost instantaneous response. I know that the emails I have received have been a source of great comfort and I will keep all of them for as long as I have the disc space to do so.

Meanwhile, it is great fun to pore back over my mother's written correspondence to see what was on our minds, say, 25 years ago.