Handwritten letters made emotions tangible

In the age of e-mail, Skype and texting, letter writing is a dying art. But they don't capture the emotion we expressed in writing, in a million different ways, was simply that we missed each other. And we could touch the very paper they'd touched.

A lifetime of letters is strewn all over the terra cotta floor. I can see my late grandfather’s long, sloping writing on paper he cut to size so as not to be wasteful; the tightly knitted biro scrawl of my best friend on hundreds of thin blue airmail envelopes from Kenya; and the fat script with hearts dotting the “i’s” that, as teenage schoolgirls, we all used to write to each other in the holidays.

Thirty years' worth of correspondence got soaked when my radiators burst in the cold Italian winter this year and now I am using electric heaters to dry them out. Just a glance at familiar handwriting on an envelope can make my heart race at the memory of waiting for that person to write. And we didn't just write a few lines. We wrote pages and pages and pages.

Anna Blundy is a novelist and journalist based in London.