Letter-writing, along with legible handwriting, has almost become a lost art.

No wonder, when teenagers’ most dextrous digits are their thumbs.

DO we really need letters any more?

According to the country’s biggest exam board, teenagers have no idea how to write a letter – grammar, spelling, handwriting, punctuation, lay out, salutation, sign off. Anything really. Clueless, absolutely clueless. Their letters, such as they are, are virtually unreadable.

Letter writing is a lost art. But then again, so is darning or spinning or skinning a rabbit or hand-stitching button holes. All of them possibly useful on occasions, but not exactly essential to us all as we skip along life’s path.

So rare are letters now that many businesses have no facility for dealing with them. They work only on phone calls or emails.

Not right, I admit, but that is the way of the world.

Job applications are increasingly done via the internet. Not knowing how to fill in an online application form is more of a handicap than being unable to write a letter.

Not only can fewer people write a letter, but fewer people can read one, which doesn’t help. As we use handwriting less and less, we are no longer as accustomed to deciphering it, even our own. Easy if you know how. Like some secret code if you don’t.

Letters are wonderful. Personal letters are a rare treat and much appreciated, to be savoured and kept rather than – like an e-mail – clicked and deleted. Business letters these days are the poor relation to the internet.

Knowing how to lay out a letter is a useful skill. Knowing how to write legibly, grammatically, with correct punctuation and spelling is a vital one – equally applicable to e-mails.

E-mails and texts vanish into the ether. Letters can last forever. But that’s not much use if they’re so badly written, you can’t actually read them.

STRANGE but serious question. Are there any birdwatchers out there who are also fans of the old TV classic The Addams Family? Can you remember the theme tune?

Their house is a museum When people come to see’em They really are a scream The Addams Family.

It’s just that every morning when I am woken up by the wonderful dawn chorus, there is a tune I recognise in the middle of it all. So, please, put me out of my misery.

Which bird call is exactly the same as the first six notes of that theme tune?

GEORGIA Gould, 22, wants to be an MP.

She has already been shortlisted for selection in a safe Labour seat. Objectors cry “nepotism!”, pointing out that she is the daughter of Labour party bigwig, Lord Gould, a great friend of Tony Blair. Georgia has spent all her life with politics and politicians.

Which is precisely why she is not qualified to be an MP. She knows little of the real world, little of what goes on outside those narrow political circles. And in that, despite her young age, she is not alone.

Increasingly, MPs come from inside the Westminster world – they are researchers, or advisers, or party workers, or do any other of those vague sounding jobs that hardly sound like jobs at all. They don’t, after all, actually publish job descriptions that say “Spreader of scandal and scurrilous e-mails”.

Long gone are the days when MPs came to the House with a huge variety of different backgrounds and experiences – whether it was working down the pits or running a country estate, all of which gave them a firm foothold in the outside world.

Now too many of them share the same experiences and backgrounds as each other – and all very different from the rest of us. Doesn’t help, does it?

That Georgia is only 22 doesn’t matter that much. If she had grown up with different parents doing different jobs with different friends and acquaintances, she would still know a great deal more about the real world than an awful lot of our so-called representatives.

THE grill broke on my not quite two-year-old cooker. I rang Bosch. Twenty-four hours later, a nice man turned up with a new grill.

He fitted it. There was no charge. I am still in a state of shock at the ease and efficiency of the service. Of course it should always work like that. But it doesn’t, does it? That’s why I’m in shock.

WOMEN under 25 are more likely to have a baby than to be married. For the first time, babies come before marriage for most women.

For all sorts of reasons. Just as there is all sorts of proof that, on balance, children do better in families where the parents are married and have made a public commitment to each other. But that was before the average wedding cost nearly as much as the average annual wage.

A good number of these unmarried mothers aren’t actually single. Quite a few, I suspect, are happily and committedly co-habiting but just can’t cope with the idea of a wedding and all the fuss and expense involved.

The more elaborate and the more expensive weddings become, the more they become an expense too far for couples who’d rather spend the money on a house, or a holiday, or a nursery.

Children need two parents committed to them and each other. If they have that, then marriage vows, however reassuring, are a bonus.

Council let down patients and nurses

MARGARET Haywood was an experienced nurse, so appalled by the way things were going in a hospital where she worked that she secretly filmed it for a Panorama programme.

It included distressing scenes such as terminally ill patients not getting pain relief and other vulnerable elderly patients not being fed or taken to the toilet when they needed to.

Miss Haywood’s filming was a brave move by a woman who cared desperately about what was happening to patients – and her own profession.

And what happened? Did the Nursing and Midwifery Council praise her, listen to her concerns, immediately look at what was going wrong and encourage people to tell them?

No. Instead they struck Miss Haywood off the nursing register for breaching patient confidentiality. Which seems to say you can neglect patients, leave them hungry, in their own dirt and in terrible pain – but as long as you don’t tell anyone, that’s all right. And who in the future is going to speak up? What incentive is there for anyone to challenge bad practice, incompetence, mismanagement or just plain old-fashioned neglect?

Keeping patient confidentiality is commendable. Loyalty to one’s colleagues is commendable, but there are more important considerations. And if the Nursing and Midwifery Council can’t see that, then they have betrayed some of the country’s most vulnerable people – and their own nurses.