THERE'S something about a lost letter, something annoying for sure, tragic quite possibly if you are a heroine of a Thomas Hardy novel, with a letter lying unread under the carpet, and yet just think of the possibilities.

The Royal Mail loses letters by the sackful, apparently. According to a new survey, nearly a million letters a week go astray. The Royal Mail doesn't agree that so many letters are missing, which is only to be expected. Yet the rights and wrongs of errant mail don't interest me much at the moment.

No, what is exciting about this apparent incompetence on behalf of the Post Office is this: letters that never arrive are often much more interesting than those that do.

After all, look at your morning post and what do you get? Applications for credit cards, bills attached to those credit cards you were foolish enough to take out, deeply depressing bank state-ments, catalogues from that kitchen company whose laughably expensive products you once expressed a glancing interest in, another brochure from a company whose clothes you don't like anyway, and postcards sent by friends or relatives having a nicer time than you are.

Now the postcards are pleasing enough, as it is always good to hear from those closest to you, even if in recipro-cation all I do when on holiday is send out postcards no one can read without the help of a code-breaker with exceptional eyesight and a degree in cryptic squiggles.

Set against all these properly directed letters, the missing envelopes offer so much more hope. They also help to explain an awful lot. After all, how else can it be that the novel I sent out to literary agents was never accepted? The answer is now obvious and blinding: the letter telling me this was the best book since Dickens curled up at the edges was lost in the post. Now everything makes sense.

Other letters that never arrived include those containing large sums of money from the Readers' Digest, whose extravagant promises I am rash enough to believe. As for those Premium Bonds, which have been languishing for years in the dusty drawer marked 'This one will never, ever win, sucker', the good news is that the cheques must have been lost in the post.

And all those distant friends who don't write any more, probably for the entire-ly selfish reason that I don't write to them, well, their letters must also have slipped into a sorting office crevice somewhere or other.

All this believing in letters that never arrive is a foolish but enjoyable form of optimism. Each morning you await the post, view the disappointing missives with a weary eye, then think, "Well, you never know."

These four cheerful words are as close to a motto as I can manage, and much hope do they contain. If you spend your life 'well-you-never-knowing', the world doesn't seem so bad, as anything is possible. The optimist sifting through the post in search of cheques or other profitable news, or long-lost friends suddenly materialising, will live to see another day when once again anything will possible.

And while it is true that my grand-father was still waiting for the cheque that never came up until the day he died, at least he had something to keep him going for nigh on 80 years, which is more than the pessimistic realist who just knows that nothing good will ever turn up, and can only find comfort in gloomy bank statements.

OUT OF the mouths of babes and 12-year-olds: "Why are there all those pictures of Prince William in the newspapers?" Well, because he is 18. Which paternal answer earns the response: "So?" Well again, one day he will probably be King. "So? Why is that interesting?"

Funnily enough, I think the boy may have a point...