Last month, I went back to what I should call my parents’ house for a few days and finally threw out all of my school and university notes. I am naturally a hoarder, but when my mum made the reasonable point that my old room would be more use to them as a guest bedroom than a repository for old copies of Viz, I began the bitter-sweet process of looking through files of things I’d hoarded. I liked to think of them as "my papers" or "my estate" but my parents, who have been tripping over them for the last fifteen years called "that junk in your room."

The oldest thing I found was an undated exercise book from when I was five or six years old, in which the important events of my life are carefully noted, and accompanied by a picture, executed in crayon. The best story involved me being stung by a wasp. The accompanying picture shows a five year old being attacked by something approximately the size of a golden eagle. Other stories, often merely fragments of tales, reveal a contented life centring on Christmas shopping, some cousins visiting and a walk in the woods (an owl is seen, like something escaped from Jurassic Park. I’ve never seen an owl in the wild before, so I was probably exaggerating to try to impress Mrs Sprott at that point). I couldn’t face burning that book, so it remains, a fragment of a life, seen through a glass, darkly.

Moving through the years and through schools, my handwriting deteriorates and my imagination improves but my artistic skills remain at the stage where an owl and a wasp are rendered identical. My head ruled my heart in most cases, and drafts of essays, went into the flames, finally cancelling out the stresses and heartaches of Sunday nights battling with long-division and the pluperfect tense.

I had no such qualms throwing my A Level French notes into the fire. Indeed, only at Nazi rallies were books burned with greater enthusiasm. French and I did not get on at all. I was always a middling student – at school and a total of nine years at university, I was a solid C+ / B- student. If I tried, or if a topic interested me, I could engage my brain and get an A, but generally, I rested mid-table. Except for French. Even the memories of it makes me feel unwell, so it was with undiluted happiness that I watched the flames engulf my essays on Marcel Pagnol’s family holidays.

One of the most interesting sets of papers I discovered were letters written by school friends during our first year at university. I’d kept scores of letters, crammed into a shoebox, complete with their envelopes. The letters were heartbreakingly enthusiastic. They contained long descriptions of university life from all over Britain in the mid-1990s. There were tales of formal dinners, three-legged pub-crawls and all the other usual Fresher activities, written in pens of various qualities in immediately familiar handwriting.

I sat and read them all, enjoying stories of awful housemates, cheap cider ("It’s only £2 for an enormous plastic bottle. I think it’s making my teeth itch") and long convoluted plans for Christmas get togethers. This was 1995. Pre-mobile phones.

The last letter in the box was from an Oxford-based friend and finished with a PS enquiring if I had an email address. He gave his email address and suggested I try it out. That was the last letter.

From then on, all of my correspondence with my friends from school has been done by email, text or phone calls. There are no more long, multi-page letters, with scribbled out sentences and strange spellings.

It’s a shame, not only because the death of paper writing means there aren’t Freshers going to university this year storing letters in shoeboxes, but also because I no longer have the opportunity to accompany my letters with crayon drawings.