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stranger’s morning in some significant fashion. On Mondays I post them, stuffing everything into the big red postbox on Sydney Road in happy fistfuls.
    That we have somehow created a position for ourselves as conduit, a bridge between a shy audience member and their mother, or ex-lover, or erstwhile primary school teacher (‘Dear Mrs Abercrombie, I hope you don’t mind but I found your postal address on my iPhone . . .’) is a wonderful feeling. It’s doubtful we’ll be receiving knighthoods from Australia Post but it’s difficult not to feel as though you’re part of something very special when you consider that at least one hundred people who may not have otherwise received a personal letter in their letterbox will now be doing so just because Michaela and I needed a public place to get drunk on a Sunday afternoon.
    Perhaps it’s because I was conceived back in the day when my father’s only job was being a mascot for Australia Post airmail, but I love getting letters. Doesn’t everybody? Saying you like receiving personal letters in the post is like stating that you rather enjoy breathing, or having ears on either side of your head: it’s taken as a given, and not to be used as a quirky character trait to lure in members of the opposite sex on dating sites. Even seeing the spidery, in-my-day-we-sent-letters-via-donkey-and-wolfpack handwriting of an elderly relative can send a cheap frisson when indulging in a dressing-gowned visit to the front gate.
    Because they do, letters, don’t they? They exist in a tangible, rich way that their cheap, instant-gratification-grasping distant cousin emails can only dream of. There are too many vague, unfulfilled promises in emails, too much that passes us by in a manic rush of deleting and copying and pasting and BCC-ing. A letter is a long and leisurely afternoon lying naked on a picnic rug eating a Flake.
    I once held a passionate discourse with a feline-eyed slice of wonderful via email. Outside of a brief and not unexciting handholding session in a country carpark, that was about as far as our romance progressed. Everything else was charted in breathless late-night paragraphs, pressing ‘send’ and then waiting agonising hours for a response. I didn’t have a mobile phone back then so we didn’t text. He was in a relationship so I wasn’t able to write postcards. Had I not printed out our correspondence in a tearful burst of sentimentality it all would have disappeared in the great hard-drive crash of 2004 and I would only have ever recalled his prose in vague fragments. And what a pity it would have been, to lose that sense of urgent subtext and collection of our beautiful, shared, misspent memory.
    Letters make you wait. Letters make you patient. You can hold a letter in your hand, kiss it, inhale the tobacco aroma of its author. You can keep it in a shoebox. You can cry over it and smear the text with your salty emoting.
    In the late 1990s, I went on what could only be called a letter-writing binge. I wrote to everybody. I wrote to Joan Kirner and Jeff Kennett and John Cain. I wrote a love letter to the now sadly deceased ABC journalist Paul Lyneham (who penned a handwritten response which included the rather bemused: ‘most viewers only write to complain so supportive comments like yours are highly valued’). I wrote to Bill Bryson and David Sedaris and Michael J Fox. I wrote hate mail to Aden Ridgeway and those three other Australian Democrat jerkoffs when they banded together and bloodlessly shunted the bright, brilliant Senator Natasha Stott Despoja. Some of the people I wrote to responded. Some didn’t. A small handful very likely called the authorities who to this day I expect still have me on file.
    I printed and kept these letters in a plastic ringbinder where they sat for over ten years. When during an idle moment Michaela asked me to think about topics for future Women of Letters events