Two weeks ago I visited the offices of my former employer in Milan. There, deep in the cellar, were two boxes that I had happily abandoned when I left the country in September 2001 - the day before the 9/11 terror attacks.

Over the last eight years men had flown planes into sky scrapers, wars had raged in Iraq and Afghanistan and, as always, people had lived, died, loved and cried. But while the world changed, my books just sat in the swirling dust in the half light from a ventilation shaft, surrounded by old flipcharts, ancient 1970s tape recorders and the fading records of a thousand students.

Like an archaeologist exploring an Egyptian tomb, I shone my torch round the cellar, saw my boxes, and hauled them to the ground with a bump. Slitting them open, I turned them upside down, and the books fell into a pile in the dirt, followed by eight old lightweight aerogramme letters fluttering slowly to the ground like paper planes. These letters were all from Australia, and all from the same long-lost friend.

Gathering them up, I threw them into the refuse bag, but then I had a sudden pang of guilt. Wasn't I destroying a part of my own life history? How could I even have considered throwing them away? These were LETTERS, an ancient form of communication soon to be spoken of in the same breath as hieroglyphics, the scratching of prehistoric man on cave walls, and writing with a feather quill.

No one writes letters anymore - not even my mother. Email is a wonderful invention that affords us daily contact with friends and relatives anywhere in the world. Gone are the days of waving tearful goodbyes to emigrating relatives on ocean liners gliding out of port and, most likely, gliding out of our lives forever. We stay in touch.

But all this comes at a price. Letter writing was above all a physical activity, one that involved all the senses: the act of writing, the sound of the pen, the feeling of folding, sealing the envelope, even the smell of the paper itself. For the reader this meant the physical action of collecting the mail, tearing open the envelope, the visual impact of an individual's handwriting - spidery, curly, neat, expansive - revealing so much of the writer's character.

I picked up a letter from the cellar floor and began to read. Triumphs, disasters, sickness, health, happiness, depression, marriage, divorce, all rolled off the page: memories came flooding back. The depth of communication - the emotional honesty - truly surprised me, although I had not been surprised ten years ago. Maybe I had changed too, along with the world...

As the memories returned I remembered how I had responded to these aerogramme letters long ago. Every six months I would take a sheet of the finest Basildon Bond writing paper, fill my 1950s emerald-studded Parker fountain pen, and sit down in the window seat to summarise the last six months of my life. This had been a powerful, comforting ritual, but it was one that I no longer practised.

Expressing detailed emotions, following rituals and the physical involvement of the senses are all important to human beings, but are largely absent in written communication today. We need to find a way to compensate for this loss. The world may have changed beyond belief in 20 years, but surely people are more or less the same. Or are they?

Given the fact that letter writing is not coming back any time soon, how can we stop ourselves becoming, literally, computer-people?

Answers on a postcard...