Selfies? It was letter-writing that helped me discover myself

Igot a letter from my pen pal the other day, for the first time in more than three decades. It was more of a covering note, actually: he had found some of the letters I sent him between 1982 and 1985, and enclosed them, thinking I might find them amusing.

What a kind, and wholly erroneous, thought. I had supposed that nothing in life could be more embarrassing than the experience of rereading my own teenage diaries. I know better now.

“Dear Tom,” begins a typical offering, written on multi-coloured notepaper and decorated around the margin with doodles of hearts, each one pierced by an arrow. “I am deeply in luv with 2 people at the moment (not including you of course!): Martin Salt (who’s really hunky) and Daniel something or other who’s even more hunky. Bad luck, Tom, my heart is fickle.”

There is more in this vein – oh God, so much more. Thousands and thousands of words, carefully inscribed in the fat, rounded handwriting of a suburban 12-yearold, straining to convey a wit and sexual élan years beyond my reach. (“Write to me if you have any problems coz I’ve got a book called Sex Tips for Girls at the moment, so I can tell you all the methods of contraception you can use and other exciting things!”) The gulf between the desired and the actual effect is so wide, it gives me a kind of vertigo.

“Never write a letter while you are angry”, goes the Chinese proverb – to which I would add “or an excitable convent-school girl”.

My only consolation is that when I was growing up, everyone had a pen pal. The attics of the world must be stuffed full of similarly incriminating documents, written in glitter pen on Holly Hobbie notepaper.

Letter-writing is now such an antiquated skill that it inspires nostalgic yuletide programming. As part of its Christmas schedule, Radio 4 is doing a series called Pen Pals, in which five well-known broadcasters will undertake a handwritten correspondence with acquaintances in other countries.

The programme promises to celebrate “the art of writing a letter the old-fashioned way”.

Was the old-fashioned way really so superior? It is true that sitting down to write with pen on paper was more of a commitment – and therefore, perhaps, an art – than tapping out an email or a text message. The slowness of the gesture made it more significant both to give and to receive.

And before the internet shrank the world, a letter from a pen pal (even my Tom, who was only at a boarding school in Scotland) did feel like a thrilling blast of foreign air.

But above all, what distinguished my pen pal correspondence from a modern text flirtation was the absence of a camera phone. Without Facetime or Snapchat, I could be both present and invisible.

I could try on some of the costumes of adulthood – the Vamp, the Comedian, the Literary Wag – in front of an audience who was kept in permanent darkness.

The plump, bucktoothed child chewing her tongue in concentration became, on strawberry-scented notepaper, the Dorothy Parker of Class 7b.

I had the freedom to try on every disguise, however ill it suited me. And Tom, far away in his all-boys dorm, had the luxury of suspending his disbelief.