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of the girl I fell madly, head over heels in love with. The girl that I naively thought felt the same. But that’s okay. Please don’t think this paragraph is written with anything other than a wistful sigh. There is no pain, anger or hurt. Just my truth.
    I liked your piece. Factually, ah, bendy, but I liked it. And I see through your eyes in it. That’s what I meant about the love thing. I never saw myself as trouble. I saw myself as devoted, and willing to try, though drink and hurt I did along the way. It’s all good now. I wish I was more writey tonight, but I’m so head spun by being on a tour when I don’t even really play music . . .
    I’m so Bukowski every time you write of me. I’m going to take that as a compliment. And, I don’t think anyone can read between the lines o’ my blog. Ask Dave the Scot. I just may not be the person you remember. Or the person you think I am. That’s a real shame to me. That you don’t know me at all.
    Anyways, thanks for asking and sharing. I have no problem whatsoever with this trip you’re on. Do as you do. Write as you write. My only criticism, as a writer, would be, if you’re going to share – then don’t hold back. Because, it seems you want to share Marieke the caricature, when the soul of the Marieke that I knew, in dark, hard times, well, she was a real person. And a lovely one at that.
    Much love, missb. Hope you find what it is you’re looking for.
    Matty x

The write stuff
    In March 2010 my friend Michaela and I started a monthly literary salon called Women of Letters. It would be, we claimed grandly, ‘an homage to the lost art of letter-writing’ (we knew it was correct to use the form ‘an’ before a word starting with a silent ‘h’ even though doing so in public usually resulted in being left alone at the bar) and bring together five women from various fields who would each pen and read aloud a letter about a topic of our choosing. During a twenty-minute interval, we would encourage our audience to write letters of their own to whomsoever they chose. We would scatter the venue with aerogrammes, postcards, pens, paper and envelopes. We would have a big wooden postbox. And we would provide real, honest-to-god stamps, so that attendees could actually post their letters and someone, somewhere would one day in the near future receive them in the mail.
    Michaela and I debated a great deal over how the letter-writing part of the afternoon would work.
    â€˜People get embarrassed about audience participation,’ I pointed out. ‘They’ll think we’re stupid.’
    We workshopped ways to get the crowd excited about the idea of not talking to their friends for twenty minutes and writing a cheery little note about where they were and what they’d been up to instead. It would be a hard sell. People liked to chat at intervals. They liked to lean back in their chair and exhale languidly and pick apart everything that had occurred in the first half of the show. They certainly wouldn’t want to sit still and write letters.
    â€˜We need to try it regardless,’ replied my bespectacled conspirator, ‘and just see what happens.’
    Against all odds it worked, and we have been dumb-lucky enough to spend our hobby time putting on regular events up and down the east coast of the country. These days the interval is almost my favourite part of the day, as our five readers file from the stage to the soundtrack of ’60s pop records and I look out over the room and see three hundred or so heads bent over, focused on scribbling missives to faraway friends. More often than not I go home at day’s end slightly drunk and clumsily upend the wooden postbox over my living room floor, spilling out all the words and secrets and enclosed notes in a dizzy jumble. I look at them for a long time and think about who might be receiving them and how they may shape a