Writing letters to relatives can be a chore. It depends on the relative of course, but occasionally you can be stuck for something to say. "What can I mention to Aunt Netty… no, she wouldn’t understand any of that… that would give her a heart attack… and if I mention that she’ll be writing back to let me know her half of the family has disowned me and removed me from all their wills."
And what makes it doubly difficult is when using an Aerogramme. It is a sin (in fact I think it might be the eleventh commandment) not to use all the space in an Aerogramme. You wanna write less, it’s got to be a postcard or you spend the extra money on a real letter with small notepaper, so you don’t have to fill it up.
There is, fortunately, a backup topic that can be used in times of emergencies. Everyone knows it’s only used when you run out of things to write about, but etiquette demands that this is politely ignored.
That topic is the weather. Statistics by the Toxic Faculty of Correspondence indicate that 93% of Aerogrammes sent contain information about the weather. This can vary from a simple "We’ve had a lot of rain recently" that actually serves to spur the author on to a related, bolder, more interesting topic, to a full paragraph that contains every little detail about the amount of rain, the type of rain drops falling, comparing it to last year, other months, other cities, other countries.
So when you’re stuck with another fold of the Aerogramme to go, talk about the weather.
