Dearest you,

I love writing letters.

I love writing letters so much that I once won a prize for letter writing.

It was 1986. My English teacher decided that we would all enter the National Post Office Letter Writing Competition, a challenge that, of course, I embraced with enthusiasm. I didn’t tell anyone this, though, because everyone would have made fun of me. Even back then, in the Stone Ages, before email and social media, letter writing was deeply uncool.

The brief was to write a letter to a famous person that you admired. Whilst most of my classmates chose pop stars and footballers, I decided to write my letter as if I were Charlotte Bronte writing to her sister Anne.

I wrote it in fountain pen. In painstakingly formed italic handwriting.

Because that’s the kind of teenager I was.

I won the competition and I got whisked off in a fancy car to the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth, which was already one of my favourite places in the entire universe. (Granted, at the time, my experience of anywhere outside of West Yorkshire was somewhat limited; but, in fact, the Parsonage is still a place that is deeply beloved to me.)

I got to be a Bronte fan girl for a whole afternoon, wandering freely through all the rooms in the house that are usually cordoned off to visitors with velvet ropes.

I got to sit at Charlotte’s desk. They even let me hold her pen and try on one of her bonnets. 

I was in heaven.

Here’s a funny pic of me posing dreamily in the Parsonage window for the photographer from The Yorkshire Post. (Check out the Princess Di hair flicks).