It’s important to get a breath of fresh air every now and then. It can come from a walk in the park, of course.  But it can also come from being in contact with other people. Not just from discussions in business meetings, or from reading books containing new ideas, which are the most obvious ways of letting fresh air into your thinking. 

A different kind of fresh air comes to me every day, via the postman. It comes in the form of letters and postcards from all over the world. Most of them are from people I don’t even know, and a lot of them are accompanied by little drawings. I love the thought that goes into every one of them. First you have to choose your writing implement: a pen, a pencil,  a felt-tip. Then you select your paper.  Maybe it’s plain, or perhaps it has a texture. It could be large or small, perhaps to suit your handwriting-and the way you write can say a lot about who you are. And finally you have to find a stamp, perhaps an interesting one. 

Email is faster, of course, particularly when you need to communicate with someone on the other side of the world. But nowadays even people sitting opposite each other in an office will communicate via email.  I don’t live in the past, but that growing impersonality worries me. 

So I keep every one of them, all those letters and postcards. Once I’ve read them, they’re put in boxes, which then go into storage in my archive. I think of  them as precious evidence of what happens when people express themselves on paper-particularly when they’re not just filling in a form. To do it, they’ve had to take a breath. A breath of fresh air.