Well, it's our fault, really. No one writes letters any more. It's not only email and time and attention spans that are to blame, it's also a complete lack of courtesy. For years and years I've had a thing about thank-you letters. It's one of my bench-marks, one of my criteria of judgement of people. But now, and for some time now, no one answers any mail short of a twitter. I don't know how business survives. In my own field, writing, you'd think literate human beings, who make their living by the word, would find time to reply to a query, a request, a pitch, a comment, but they do not. I read a science fiction story once about a dying planet that had run out of metal, its life-sustaining resource. Back here on earth someone invented some sort of time/space warp container that swallowed all metal refuse and disposed of it somehow. The inventor demonstrated his new tool by dropping old razor blades into it, pointing out that unsightly landfill of used cars would be a thing of the past. All used metal could be sent off the earth - to somewhere. Who cared? In the meantime, back on the dying planet, a razor blade clinked onto a barren moor. I used to have a theory that mailboxes were entry points to other planets: once you mailed a letter, it disappeared and you never heard of it, or from the recipient, again. And that's why the Post Office is going to disappear, like all the stuff one used to put into mailboxes. Others will suffer.