I remember writing and receiving letters. I lived in a reasonably small rural town and from time to time would meet a girl from the next town along, or if I was

I remember writing and receiving letters. I lived in a reasonably small rural town and from time to time would meet a girl from the next town along, or if I was truly fortunate even further afield. I used to "go for a walk" many evenings and drop coins into the pay phone around the corner to talk to these people. Or, arrive home from school with the greatest expectation if I thought there might be a letter waiting for me. I think there is still a drawer full of these teenage missives in my mother's house. I left home at 18 and travelled to the other side of the world for a year. This was 1992. No mobile phones and certainly no consumer Internet to speak of. I'd call my family maybe once a month and I think I wrote about a dozen letters the whole time. After returning to my birth country, for the next 12 months I think I wrote even more letters to those I'd met abroad. By 1994 I was running up massive phone bills connecting to BBSs on a 2400 baud modem. I remember the first graphic I ever downloaded from the Internet was a picture of the Louvre. I used Slipknot.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_%28web_browser%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_%28web_browser%29