50,000 letters! 

This news item appeared on the BBC News website last week, celebrating 77 years of daily letter-writing and exchanges between best friends Mary and Cathy. Just imagine it – 56,210 letters. And all of them destroyed once read, which turned my mind in the direction of working out, if they had been kept, then just how BIG 56,210 letters might be. Would they take up a whole room? more than one, perhaps? They wrote every day, and what they wrote was posted once a week (a kind of diary approach to letter-writing that also appears in many letters in the 18th and 19th centuries when postal services were few and far between). This continued until Cathy died in August 2016. In the brief interview with Mary on the BBC News website, she didn’t say if she still wrote or not, but that she missed Cathy and that there was no one like her.

Last updated: 6 October 2016