In 1996 while clearing out his mother’s council flat after her death, Rory Cellan-Jones discovered what amounted to a remarkable archive, thousands of letters and documents telling the story of her life, from the 1930s to a few months before she died. 

It was 25 years later, now in the era of WhatsApp, that he returned to the archive to write Ruskin Park, a memoir about his mother and her disastrous love affair with a much younger BBC colleague, the father Cellan-Jones did not meet until he was an adult.  The book would not have been possible to write, and the author would not have learned the full story of how he came to be born if those letters had not been written and kept.  So what will our children find when we die – a Facebook account, some emails stored on a computer with a password that can’t be cracked, a phone with WhatsApp chats more than 14 days old deleted?  And will biographers and historians find a subject’s social media updates quite as revealing as their private letters once were?

Rory Cellan-Jones reflects on how his view of his parents was transformed by the experience of reading their letters and asks what we have lost since we stopped putting pen to paper.