INKTHERAPY

‘My dearest girl…’ So starts one of the many love letters British romantic poet John Keats wrote in his elegant handwriting to his muse Fanny Brawne.

One of the most famous love letters of all time is addressed to Fanny: ‘I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my mind …’

Two hundred years later the emotion still drips, sweet as honey, from the yellowed writing paper. As if one can see him sitting, deep in thought, at his writing desk next to the peppermint-green chaise longue in front of the window in his stately Hampstead house.

I still have a letter that my friend Sunel wrote to me in 1976 before we left school. Every time I read it, I smell the tomato sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and packed into my leather school bag, and I feel the wind at the bus stop blowing through our thin blue school uniforms.

Family letters that stretch from the Anglo-Boer War to after World War II are safely stored in a small green wooden box. They tell of the hardships on the family farm at Kalkbank, the men who left to fight against the Tommies, later the rationing of fuel. Our country’s history captured in pen and ink, communicated between relatives.

Emotions tucked into envelopes, timeless. That’s what handwritten letters