When I was at school, the beech veneer letter rack was at the bottom of the stairs leading down from our bedrooms. I used to go to breakfast early in the morning and then come back to see if there was anything in the post for me around half past eight. When there were no letters in the 'S' rack, I felt incredibly lonely and sick in the stomach, knowing nothing much ever came in the second post and it would be another 24 hours before the post came again.

Often though there were letters from my family, especially my grandparents who used to write to me a lot. Once my grandfather wrote me a long letter and, knowing how much I pinned on getting post, divided it up into nine separate envelopes and posted them over a few days. The pages just stopped at the bottom, mid-sentence, and I had to wait another day for the next installment.

After I left school, and had left Australia, I carried on a relationship with someone who used to write me long, long letters full of news, thoughts and longing. I spent my evenings replying, crafting page after page of my own news and sadness at our separation. Everything I experienced in my days went into those letters; there was nothing that went through my mind that didn't get repeated on those thin Air-Mail pages and then folded up and sent off in an envelope to Australia. Even though we could make cheap telephone calls and we did- we spent hours on the phone too- it was those letters that meant something. They had taken time to compose; they were undistracted pieces of our lives which carried so much with them.

When I lived in Ziguinchor, my other grandparents wrote to me often and I had a lot of time to reply. Invariably I would get one envelope from them with two letters inside, one from my grandpa and one from my granny. They had both spent time with my last letter and replied in their own way, my granny's reply full of news of things she had done with the French group that she belonged to ('the French Circle") and her early mornings at Columbia Road flower market, and my grandpa's letter in large scrawling script telling me about what he had been reading, what plays they had been to see, and what he thought of the things I had told him about the people I lived with and the way we lived.

Once I told them how T. was disappointed with the little moped I had bought, wishing I had instead bought a roaring motorbike.

"Typical African," my grandpa replied, suggesting that T.'s love of expensive motorbikes was somehow connected to the greedy African dictators that he actually knew a lot about.

"Typical man," my granny replied in her version of the reply.

I have kept every letter I've ever received in the years since I left school. They are in their own shoe box, with their own ribbon tied around them, kept high up on a shelf, near the door if I ever had to grab them in a fire. My grandparents- the ones who wrote letters- are gone now but occasionally I'll forget and think to myself, I must remember to tell granny that when I write to her.

It's hard to find an hour or two of uninterrupted time to sit down and compose a letter but I did this week and though it felt unnatural and my fingers cramped up, I quite enjoyed it. I wish I had more people to write to though and then I really would find the time.