I missed being thoughtful (about remembering) yesterday. I meant to do it last night but my picky, favourite dinner guest called and asked to share dinner with me and we talked till 11 o’clock. I always clean up before I go to bed; it makes the morning easier to leap (crawl?) into. So here we are: I emptied the dishwasher and I’m checking in before I swim at 6. You don’t have to know all that but I have to settle myself .

When did the habit begin of writing a letter to accompany a Christmas card? I’m not sure whether it continues in such large proportions now as it used to. What with email and a dearth of time, communications are not as generous as they used to be. I wonder if in the future there will be entire books devoted to an e-correspondence between two articulate people. I wonder if people will be as articulate.

That’s another discussion. Right now I bring up Christmas letters because I have to figure out what to do about them. I had extended my seasonal group letters to other times of the year. I called them generic letters because they were aimed (rather than focused) at a number of people and were neither gender nor seasonal specific. Then I began to send my generic letters online, although I had to print and mail some to friends who were not computer-friendly or literate - computer-literate, that is.

Now I write daily (almost) blogs and I have just added Twitter and I still keep a diary, though I fear it has descended to a Nag Book. So what happens to my generic letters ? Should I mail copies of a relevant blog to people who enjoy receiving something other than a fund-raising pitch? Should I revert to writing a summary of The Year That Was? Or should I quit?

I have to swim now....