We should cherish handwriting: the scribbled, the scrawled, the stubbornly jotted | Alex Clark

Our communications lose character when we give up putting pen to paper. It's hard to imagine an Auden poem celebrating the arrival of the night email

Things ain't what they used to be, and it's hard to imagine a beleaguered institution suffering reputational damage these days sending for filmmakers, a composer and a poet, as did the General Post Office in 1936. Indeed, now it's the filmmakers who seem to have shone the strongest light on the injustices visited on so many sub-postmasters and covered up for so long. But back in the 1930s, collaboration between a public institution and the creative arts resulted in Night Mail, a short black-and-whitefilm picturing the journey of a postal train from Euston to Aberdeen, set to a score by Benjamin Britten and concluding with a poem by WH Auden, which was painstakingly constructed to mirror the rhythm and speed of the train's progress. The GPO's ambition - to portray its service as modern, reliable and vital to the life of the nation, as well as to bolster the morale of its underpaid workers - was largely satisfied.

Auden's poem - until Four Weddings and a Funeral stopped all the clocks - became perhaps his most quoted, and among its achievements is a keen understanding of what the post meant to its recipients; the daily tombola that might bring the brown envelopes of officialdom but also a love letter, an unexpected card from foreign parts, an invitation to a party. The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,/ The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,/ Clever, stupid, short and long,/ The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong."