It’s one of those strange things in life which comes up now and then: someone writes to me, tells me a little story about how things are going for them and what has been happening recently, and it mixes in perfectly with what has been happening to me. Or someone makes a comment about a…

I’m going to put myself out on a limb here and make a guess which could be seen as a generalisation, which could be both disapproved and disproved by some people, and which might almost seem to be commonsense but, in reality, it is something which needs to be said and thought about to be…

If there is one thing which scares a letter writer more than that blank page, it is the thought that they have worked hard, sometimes for hours, and produced a piece of prose worthy of the highest accolades, only to have it lost in the postal system somewhere. We all hear of the stories where…

I’ve always been fascinated by the opinions people hold of themselves, much more than those they have of other people who they might or might not know which, though often honest and forthright when brought out, tend to be very limited according to what a person has personally seen of that other man or woman,…

If there is one thing that I have discovered in my many years of life on this small rock, hurtling through space, it is that there is no one who is not interesting, but hundreds, if not thousands of people who believe that their lives are boring, that they have nothing to say, that other…

Zarathustra seems to be following my every move of late, not so much lurking in the background and sending strange thoughts into my mind on spirituality, belief, dogma and the Enlightenment, but more springing out where I least expect him and stunning me with the source of his words. But even this is not quite…

I would go a few steps further than the old ‘don’t believe everything you read’ and suggest that people should only truly trust that which can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and remain sceptical of everything else, not so much to remove any level of trust people might have, but to inspire…

When I think about how hard it is to live with someone you love and cherish, I find it easier to envision the problems which can arise when you are forced to spend time, without little hope of reprieve, with someone who is not so high on your wish list. I used to think it…

The decision on who to write to is not always an easy one: there are tens of thousands of advertisements in the internet which press themselves upon those willing to put pen to paper, or fingers to screens, vying for attention, and some of them are attractive, some enticing, some scary. This, I hasten to…

What goes through anyone’s mind when they decide to keep – or hoard – anything? I suppose, if you’re going to think about personal matters, then love letters are the prime targets for a collector, not just because of the intimacy that is within, but also because they bring back memories of a better time,…