My dad’s Christmas round robins used to mortify me: now I see the magic in them | Tom Nicholson

As a teen, I dreaded the annual update on my gawky progress. But the letters have become a glorious archive of the mundane

The round robin is very, very dead. Even Debrett's thinks they're tedious and unnecessary, and keeping tedious and unnecessary stuff going is Debrett's whole thing. The idea of an end-of-year roundup shoved into a Christmas card has been dead for so long that even the whole tranche of comedy built on mimicking the smuggest, most thunderingly boring retellings of the year's exploits - incredible trips abroad, professional triumphs, angelic and gifted children - is gone too.

The reasons are fairly obvious. If I want to know what your kids are up to and where you went on holiday, Instagram will tell me. If I want your take on the state of the nation, I'll check which James O'Brien clips you've retweeted. If I ever want to know how your career's going, I'll snoop on your LinkedIn. And generally, I don't want any of these things anyway.

Tom Nicholson is a freelance writer