Two letters.

Two handwritten letters arrived this morning.

I had to stop for a moment. Who gets two handwritten letters in the post these days?

I’m taking it as a good sign.

The first is in Italian. Black ink on cream paper, a red fan at the top: Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong. There is even a telex number at the bottom.

A man in Bologna, writing about South Tyrol, on paper from Hong Kong. I wonder how long he had kept that paper.

He had read an interview with me in Carlino Economia. Bressanone, mountains, horses. Those words had taken him back to summers with his wife: Ranuihof in Val di Funes, Castel Steinbock in Villandro, Bressanone.

He wrote about the food, the wine and the people. And about Bologna today, a city he says he no longer recognises.

Then he turned to my own path through education and work, and the idea of helping people live and work better. That part of the interview had stayed with him.

We have never met.

I liked knowing where those words had landed. I had spoken about places and work; someone reading had remembered summers with his wife, then sat down to tell me about them.

The second letter is in blue ink. Careful handwriting on dotted lines, with colourful paper behind it.

The writer is eleven. At school, they are talking about choosing a career. He thought I might have something useful to offer:

“What two pieces of advice would you give me for choosing my future career?”

I smiled. Then came the head-scratching.

Two pieces of advice suddenly feel like quite a responsibility when the person asking is eleven.

And then there are the dates.

Two cities, two languages, the same date. And they reached me on the same morning.

His unease about Bologna stayed with me, too. I think Italy needs hope. Europe, too.

And people willing to make an extra effort, even when it would be easier to leave it to someone else. People who care enough to start something, fix something, see it through.

Perhaps that eleven-year-old and yours truly can each contribute something. I don’t know where his path will take him. I still have plenty to do on mine.

But what advice would actually help him?

I know how easy it is to explain a life backwards. You draw a line through the decisions, the encounters, the things that worked. After a while, the line starts to look rather like a plan.

How much of what I could tell him only makes sense because I already know how my own story unfolded? What would have helped me at his age?

And would I have listened?

Somewhere in all of this, I remembered my own answer.

When I was a little boy and people asked what I wanted to be, I said, without the slightest hesitation:

“Captain.”

I’d almost forgotten that. The certainty of it.

Today, two pieces of advice make me stop and think. Little Christoph had his whole future sorted in one word.

I’ve written back to the boy. I’ll keep that part between us.

Both letters have stayed with me. So has the old photograph I found: the striped jumper, the enormous collar, that little grin.

I look at that boy and wonder what he would make of me today. There is quite a lot I could tell him about how things turned out.

He’d probably want to know what happened to the ship.