So true, Gilbert, so very, very true: 'castration...' really does as you say in your letter, '...have a strange effect...'. Difficult, if not actually impossible, to work up a counter argument that it does n't. It just does. Never the same. No way back. But that's another story.

Gilbert, by the way, is the Gilbert White of the Natural History of Selborne fame, and it was thumbing through an illustrated copy of that book in Cheapside Daunts earlier this evening where I found this sentence beginning a letter to one of his correspondents. He, then, elegantly takes this image , and explores it's effects across a range of fauna, including, unsurprisingly, men.

There's no question, for me at least, that this is possibly one of the most original (and wince inducing) openings to a letter ever. But it's not the first genuinely different approach to a letter I've seen today. Proof, in a small way, that lightening can strike twice in the same place. 

The other example is from a letter of condolence written by Samuel Beckett, and then discovered by one of my friends and circulated on Facebook. 

Condolence letters are the hardest and as such vulnerable to well meaning cliche. And why should n't they be...after all they're written with passion, sometimes in haste, and too often in a struggle to get the right tone. Beckett's letter, however, is a masterpiece of simplicity and profundity. A template in thoughtfulness and humility, affection and sympathy. 

Here it is: "I know your sorrow and that for the likes of us there is no ease from the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow's fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds".