A really lovely thing happened yesterday. If you want to find out what it was, skip to the end. First, I'm going to give it a bit of context, and waffle on about some other things I did as a kid which never crop up in conversation. It's time to learn about me. Strap in, Jim!

When I was about thirteen, I was starting to get into anime, and Japan in general. It all seemed so exciting. Japan was a country which I knew absolutely nothing about, and had never had any sort of impact on my life up until that age, so discovering all this new anime, music, movies, and a whole new language, was heaps of fun. The Paramount Channel started showing anime late at night, so I started staying up until ungodly hours waiting to watch shows like Cyber City Oedo, Project A-Ko and Dominion Tank Police. Aah, such memories! It was usually on around midnight, so while waiting for it to start, I'd also watch lots of American comedy. The Critic, Dr. Katz, Frasier, Due South, Sledge Hammer, It's Gary Shandling's Show, and a LOT of stand-up. This led me to start consuming comedy with such a gargantuan appetite.

I also read teletext a lot. The Paramount Channel and Nickelodeon's teletext were both written by the same chap, who went by the monicker of "Ed". The quantity of pages that this guy would knock out in a day was quite something. Ed made sure that every single episode of every show that his channels pumped out had a one-page synopsis, and if you pressed reveal, you could also see the series and episode number. For a geek in the days before the internets, this was very exciting stuff. On top of that, Paramount had a daily letters page called Mailbox, which was a bit like a chat room before the internet. It was updated daily with about thirty pages of correspondence, with the majority of people using pen-names, talking to other readers through the letters page. The turnover of copy on those sites was such that it would be perfectly possible to spend an hour a day on teletext (coupled with all the glorious stuff on Channel 4, like Digitizer, and Planet Sound (did I remember that name right?). In retrospect, of course my time would have been far better spent reading books, and playing in the sunshine. Yeah, it's easy to point it out now, but where were you at the time? Eating Pot Noodle out of a dog's mimsy, that's where. So clean up the mess in your own back garden!

Nickelodeon teletext had a penpal service. I quite liked the idea of having pen friends. I wasn't hugely popular in school, so it seemed like a good way of having people to talk to without having to worry about them thinking I was a bit rubbish. So I sent off an advert. It was terribly generic. Something along the lines of "Hi! I'm Chris, a 13 y/o from Berkshire. I like music, basketball, computers and socialising. Let's be friends!", though possibly less interesting than that.

I was really excited when it appeared. The novelty of seeing something I've done on TV didn't wear off for a long time. I'd happily sit through ten pages of scrolling pages, just to see my penpal ad for five seconds at a time. It was a bit like that time when ITN filmed me playing Super Mario 3 in my bedroom after an interview they did with me about whether video games were addictive. I seem to remember saying "I don't think they're addictive. They help with my reflexes and education. I only play games for five hours a day!" Oh dear me. I also seem to recall Dominic Diamond mocking me when the news snapped back to the studio - and rightly so, too! But the footage from that interview got used on all the ITN subsidiary shows whenever they did a report on video games and needed a graphic. I found out about this when a girl came into school and told me that she'd seen me on The Big Breakfast that day. I thought she was testing my famous gullibility, until a few months later when I almost spat out my toast, as my stupid child face filled the screen. Who needs that when they're eating?! But it was still hugely exciting. Like being a celebrity, except without the fame, and lots of mockery from the ammunition that I had given the school Tough-Jacks.

Come to think of it, I should give that a bit of context, too. When I was nine, I won a competition that The Sun put on with Nintendo to see who was the best at games and that. Yes kneel before... The Nintendo Champion, 1992! All your admiration is perfectly correct, and that warm, moist sensation stirring between your thighs, that intense desire to pin me against a wall and screw me senseless, are natural. After all, I got the furthest into the first level of a speed run of Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers!!! Basically, I played loads of games and won, and in exchange, I got two weeks in Florida, a load of games, and I got to sit on Pat Sharp's lap. Sometimes I won in quite unfair circumstances - for example, the final round was a game of Dr Mario, a game which I was able to win because I owned it, and my opponent had never played. But who cares - I went to Florida!

But back to the story. I wrote into the Penpals page, but didn't hear anything back for about four months, by which point I'd totally forgotten about it. Then one day a big fuck-off envelope fell through my door. I guess that Ed was so busy writing stuff that he didn't have time to sort the penpals bit out. But somehow my dull and lifeless ad had got about thirty replies! All from girls, too. I wrote back to almost ever single one of them. I remember one of them being so frightening that I could barely bring myself to read to the end, for fear that she would actually spring out of the page and shout things at me. Two of them forgot to put their address on, which for some reason made me feel guilty that I couldn't reply, rather than thinking that they were a bit dim. As for the rest, there was a whole mixture of people. Some were very trendy and popular, some were rock 'n' roll, some were shy and bookish, and some of the girls had other personalities! Imagine that, with your tiny mind! To begin with I wrote to all 28 of them. After a couple of mails, I stopped writing to a few, and some stopped writing to me, but for the best part of five months, I was in regular correspondence with about 20 girls, all by hand-written letter.

The problem was that, with so many pen-friends, it became difficult remembering who I had and hadn't written to. So I made a table, with columns for each penpal, and rows for "thinks I'd dun wot I wanted to tell people wot I'd dun". So when it came to write to someone, I'd look at the chart, see what I hadn't told them, and write about it, like a robot filing a report. You'd think that would take some of the fun out of a friendship, but for some reason, I liked it. I live for admin, apparently. Without trying to get too deep, it sort of makes sense. I was very shit as a child, so it's totally believable that I would write these letters not for the friendship, but just for something to do to fill the time. In that respect, the procedure was probably a joy. God, what a massive idiot I must have been as a kid!

There was about three exceptions to that, though. There were three girls whose letters I could not wait to receive, and were a joy to read. One of them was a Chinese (I think) girl who spoke fantastically good English. She always stood out because she'd made her own envelopes out of magazine pages, and she always told such exciting stories. It pains me to say that I can't remember a great deal about the content of our letters. I hope you'll understand that it was over twelve years ago, and I find it hard to remember what I ate for dinner last night, let alone the content of letters I sent and received as a kid. But getting her letters was always an immense pleasure. I forget who stopped writing to who, but like all the penpals I had, one stopped writing to another.

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Cut to yesterday, when I got home from work, to be greeted by an unusually high pile of mail, one of which was a hand-written letter, in a writing I didn't recognise. I opened it expecting it to be a reminder from the dentist. Turns out that it was the Chinese girl that I was pen pals with twelves years ago! She was sorting through some old boxes, saw my letter, and dropped me a line to see how I'm doing! What a sweet thing to do. I really hope that I've still got her letters. I have a heart-wrenching feeling that I threw a load of mail out in a stupid teenage fit of trying to reject my childhood. If I didn't do this, then they're in the attic. Fingers crossed! She's on Facebook and that, which gives me a very good motivation to sort out my Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal user info, all of which I have neglected for far too long, considering how much time I spend on-line.

Her letter was just what I needed after a ghastly day at work. Last night, I went to bed happy. :)