Nowadays, I seldom put pen to paper.  When I do, however, it is with the fountain pen pictured above.  That pen is the most expensive object I have ever bought when you look at ROI.  It also tends to leak and leave blue marks on my index finger, but I do enjoy the result.  Or I use a pencil.

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My earliest correspondence outside the family was with Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (dating myself, I know).  My father was CEO of the largest printing and publishing company in Southern Africa, including newspapers in Rhodesia.  Somehow he met Sir Roy and they became very good friends.

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Sir Roy personally invited Mum and Dad to attend the opening of Kariba, a dam on the Zambezi which created what was then (1959) the largest man-made lake in the world.  He added a note to the effect of "bring the kids".  So, while Mum and Dad met the Queen Mother, who officiated at the opening ceremony, my brother and I sat with the workers and their families.  But, what a thrill.

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Mum encouraged me to write a thank you note to Sir Roy and thank him.  I did, and he replied thanking me for thanking him.  Then I wrote back thanking him for thanking me for thanking him.

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Corresponding with a Head of State was not the only memorable thing about that trip.  I was 11 years old and "became a woman" as the coy expression went, at my aunt's house in Bulawayo.

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Nowadays, I correspond with a variety of people via the utterly wonderful medium of email, and the unbelievably time-wasting medium of Disqus. The latter usually takes the form of trying to persuade climate change deniers that they are not doing the world - or themselves - a favor by defending the position that our not-much-loved President takes, namely that the whole idea of climate change is a hoax.

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But I have made some unexpected friends.

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Absolutely the best correspondence came about because of something my brother said: CO2 can't be good for plants because it is not down here; it is up there.

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That got me thinking.  Was he right?  Does CO2 actually form a blanket over the earth?  Is it like the ozone layer?  Google was not much help.  Probably I was phrasing the question badly.

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Eventually, I decided to consult the experts: NOAA.  If someone at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could not tell me, no one could.  I went to their website and picked a name with an email at random.  Twenty minutes after I sent off my question, I got a reply explaining that with winds and all, the CO2 was pretty much mixed through all the levels of the atmosphere.

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I was so stunned by the speed of the reply that I wrote: "Wow, I'm impressed!  Twenty minutes to reply and on a Saturday afternoon."  Quick as a flash, the answer came back: Well. we're pretty responsive when the address line says Whitehouse.

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Thanks Deke for giving me something to smile about for the next 20 years.

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Another wonderful correspondence came about as a result of the  Jumble that I enjoy doing every day (except Sundays - too difficult). This one mentioned the Steuben County landfill, which really aught my attention as I live in Steuben County and have an interest in landfills. So I tracked down Mr. Hoyt's email address and asked him how it had come about that a little-known waste facility had caught his attention. After a bit of back and forth, he actually called me and we had a great conversation. It seems that he was in our area for some reason and had read in a local paper that Steuben County had begun collecting methane from the landfill and using it to power a large number of houses in the vicinity.

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The upshot was that he sent me the PDF shown at the right. I forwarded it to the Commissioner of Public Works. A printout now has pride of place on the wall of his office.

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The solution, by the way, is waste of energy. Most unfortunately, the scheme has now been abandoned and the gas is flared.