I WAS AMONG the last generation of children to grow up in the absence of mobile phones, email and social media.

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At the age of 10 in 1998, the only knowledge I had of mobile phones was that there were called ‘cells’, were the size of a small skyscraper and went hand in hand with the exceptionally patterned sweaters sported by Zack Morris in Saved By The Bell.

Emails were even more mysterious and social media was another world entirely; one that had yet to even be created.

And that is likely why myself and my classmates were bowled over by a suggestion made by our 5th class teacher to write a letter to ourselves which she would then send back to us in ten years time.

Honestly, you’d think she had created a time machine in the middle of the classroom with little more than empty Fairy Liquid bottles and some PVA glue; we genuinely couldn’t get over the futuristic element of the whole endeavour.

So, I’ll write to myself and you’ll keep the letter and in ten years when I’m [clutches at school tie and fumbles for the corner of a desk to steady myself] TWENTY YEARS OLD, you’ll send it back to me?

She agreed that this was, indeed, the deal on the table.

As hyperbolic as it might sound, I scarcely remember my primary class so diligently taking to a project.

At 20, I was going to be an interior designer, live in a city-centre apartment and wear a beret. My friend was fairly certain that the next ten years would see her qualify as a vet, acquire a Jeep and birth twin babies. And another member of the crew went as far as drawing himself standing outside a mansion smugly holding the keys to the front door.

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Concerns were raised as to whether the letters would reach us if anyone’s parents moved house in that time, and while I can’t remember her exact response, our teacher assured these letters would make their way back to us.

We sealed the envelopes, wrote our full names and addresses in cartridge pen and marvelled over how forward-thinking our teacher was to veto the usage of stamps as the current ones may not work in ten years time.

As bizarre as it sounds now, the letters and their contents – memory of which dulled over time – were referred to regularly in the years that followed.

From waving goodbye to primary school, completing our Leaving Cert and entering college, we – half joking, whole in earnest – wondered if our 5th class teacher would remain true to her word and return our letters to us.

Given that we were fully immersed in a digital world by this point in our lives, there was now something exceptionally innocent about our endeavours – a project which we had initially considered hugely futuristic.

2008 arrived, but the letters didn’t.

Maybe she got the year wrong? Maybe it’ll be 2009? Maybe we missed a subtle lesson that day and we should never have expected to have them returned? 

The more pragmatic among us wondered if she had passed away, and the letters were still sitting unopened in a box, ready to be adorned with postage stamps and returned to us.

And the more cynical questioned whether she was living in the vicinity and knew well the closest anyone of us got to the content of our letters was our name and age.

At 20, we were all still living at home, regularly decimating our parents’ drink cabinets and the only savings we had needed to be withdrawn using a small Post Office booklet with a squirrel on the cover.  There were no berets, no Jeeps and certainly no mansions.

Maybe she was saving us the humiliation?

It’s been twenty years since the letters were written, ten years since they failed to materialise, and despite all that has occurred in our lives since then, they are still discussed among the people, whose friendships I have maintained since primary school.

But something truly captured our imaginations that day in 1998, and I suppose that in itself is enough.

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