Whatever happened to letters? Email just isn't the same Sir Mick Jagger was, it seems, a fervent letter-writer in his twenties. This surprising fact has come to light because one of his ex-girlfriends, rather unromantically, has put 10 of his love letters up for auction at Sotheby's. This has prompted another former lover of his to reveal he wrote her "hundreds." It's surprising because, in almost every other respect, his life was bohemian and unconventional. Perhaps the letter-writing was down to his grammar school education. He must have found it too hard a habit to kick. I imagine his letters are full of purple prose - I know I wouldn't like the love letters I wrote as a young man to be held up to public scrutiny - but I also imagine they will be affecting. There is nothing like a letter, written with a fountain pen, to convey feeling. Something about the way ink on the page is like blood in the veins, a living thing that is never the same from one year to the next. While blood comes out red and turns black as it ages, ink comes out black and fades to rusty brown. One imagines the 30,000 pages of emails that General John Allen is alleged to have exchanged with his mistress won't have quite the same romantic resonance. Emails are too easy to write. Too spontaneous. Their brevity may lend them wit, but not elegance. And how are you supposed to seal an email with a kiss? I recall writing first drafts of love letters - to make sure they fitted the page but also that they were lyrical and grammatically correct - then writing out a second draft, and going over that to add crossings out and ink splodges to make it look like a first draft. Mary Wakefield, the deputy editor of The Spectator, once talked me through the modern equivalent. When emailing a prospective suitor she would go back over her carefully composed words putting in typos, and exchanging capital letters for lower case, to make it look as if she didn't care. Another reason emails are inferior to letters is that they are too easy to keep. There is no point in printing them out and storing them somewhere because that will take up real space, as opposed to virtual. Love letters, by contrast, are wrapped in ribbon and stored in a shoebox, which is great for biographers. The sheer quantity of the General Allen emails seems less surprising when you consider how many letters people used to write. George Bernard Shaw was a 10-a-day man. Noël Coward was even more assiduous, writing a dozen every morning, sometimes to people he was hours away from seeing. The Duke of Wellington would spend three hours a day firing them off; in one to his brother he got so carried away he forget to mention he had been made a duke, adding it as a postscript. Leaving aside the strange boast from the Royal Mail that half of its deliveries are now junk, there are some encouraging signs that letter-writing is making a come back. Smythson, the luxury stationery company, saw its profits triple last year. And this week it was reported that the art of letter-writing is to be reintroduced as part of the curriculum in secondary schools, because a generation is growing up knowing only how to text. Luv u:-) xxx Just not the same, is it? As it looks as if Abu Qatada is here to stay, why don't we embrace him as a national treasure, if for no other reason than that it will really annoy him? I'm thinking cuddly toy effigies, and perhaps nursery rhymes and songs on the football terraces. As has been noted by The Now Show, that cheery old musical hall song Whoops, Have a Banana begs to be adapted to feature the hate preacher's name. There is a precedent for this. During the war the Ministry of Information campaigned to turn Hitler into a figure of fun, along the lines of that song about him only having one ball, or those "Careless Talk Costs Lives" posters in which he was shown in cartoon form sitting on a London bus. It worked. Hitler hated it. He put Duff Cooper, the minister of information, in his infamous Black Book of people to be shot after the invasion of England.