When was the last time you received a love letter? Or when was the last time you wrote a love letter?

Is there a box somewhere? Was there ever a box or a drawer tucked away in some dusty corner of the attic? Maybe they were there, but as the dust gathered over the letters, so the dust gathered over the relationships that prompted them?

And when they were accidentally chanced upon, on a rainy Sunday afternoon years later when you were looking for that old photo of so-and-so because such-and-such had asked if you still had it, did you angrily threw them away?

Maybe things hadn’t worked out as anticipated for the young lovers who had exchanged the epistles. Or maybe they told the story of an old love, a former romance and this physical evidence needed now to be expunged from history.

Sometime in the 1990s, when the internet came of age, we stopped writing letters. We started writing emails. Then we started texting each other.

When historians come to look at our generation or when our great great grandchildren come to look for their forebears and research their family histories what will they find? Those romantic emails and exquisite text exchanges will long since have evaporated into the ether, lost to posterity behind a wall of long lost passwords and technical advance.

Remember the floppy disc? Our memory sticks and flashy laptops with all that RAM and a billion pixels will be as antiquated as the video cassette player in just ten short years let alone a hundred.

Those great grandchildren will know more about our grandparents than they will about us. Our digital histories, all those photos we take every day, that we send on WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and the like. Those little family videos we shoot. Gone. The lot of them. They will all be long gone. Cloud storage will have simply vaporised too. Transformed more easily than the real clouds themselves disappear into mist before our eyes.

Between June 8 1949 and May 1 1958 my dad wrote 43 love letters to my mum. I know this as they have just come to light in that classic dusty box in the corner of the attic.

The first one, now some 71 years old sets up the series which tells the story of a young couple courting in the post war years, their marriage in 1953 and the birth of their first child in 1958.

All beautifully written in fountain pen, on thick letter paper (whatever happened to that) and neatly folded into squares for the small envelopes to carry them to his love. And on the envelopes, post marks that reveal not only the date, but the time of the collection. The 3.30pm afternoon collection from Argyll in Scotland features strongly in this little series.

I knew my father as a fastidious perfectionist, a scientist, guarded and remote. A man of his generation no doubt.

But when I read these letters aloud once again to his love, Muriel, 71 years later, now in her cosy care home at 95-years-old, we feel the joy, we hear the affectionate nicknames, we rediscover the rapture of a young man in love.

Mum smiles, remembers some bits, is puzzled and intrigued by others, there are bit part characters who make cameo appearances, a marriage and eventually a new birth. My brother, Philip in 1958.

“I hope I wrote nice things back,” reflects my Mum. Is there another dusty box laying somewhere else I wonder.