I’m extremely lucky to have a clutch of incredible female friends. These are wickedly funny, warm, charismatic and intelligent people who do nothing but enhance my life. Several of these wonderful women don’t share my postcode or even my county but they will still drop everything to offer support from afar.

Two of them, twin sisters Frances and Christina, are keen users of the voice note. Over recent years, with the arrival of seven children between us (and a certain medical blip in all our lives), seeing them in the flesh was very difficult. To hear their unedited voices, whether in the form of a cheerleading message to play back when an uplift is needed or a ‘banana bread baking diaries’ stream of consciousness was glorious. It’s thanks to them I’ve become a fan of the voice note myself.

I’m not a materialistic person. A boarding school and army upbringing teaches you to be minimalist. However, one of the loveliest things my closest friends and I do is to send pick-me-up parcels to each other. My friend Gemma (who I think of as a third sister) and I even coined our own term for them, ‘posals’, which must have been a portmanteau of ‘parcels in the post’.

Gemma and I have been sending each other posals since we were 12. Having been two peas in a pod at junior school together we ended up at separate senior schools. It was quite a wrench. I think it’s a great testament to the bonds of our friendship that we stayed in touch from such an early age, before emails or social media, thanks in part to the posals we exchanged.

More than 25 years on I’m still delighted to receive, often unexpected, posals from Gemma always containing exactly what I need when I need it. Frances and Christina recently sent me one too (though they aren’t familiar with the nickname) containing a beautifully curated collection of items including neon sports socks and a handbag-sized Nava notebook – you know me so well.

This morning I had another unexpected treat. In a parcel addressed to my eldest son from his godmother, my oldest friend Izzy, and along with a perfectly pitched book for him to read, I discovered three bags of spices from her recent trip to Lebannon to visit her husband’s family. A card enclosed (one to add to the old shoebox I keep letters in) explained they were from her cousin-in-law’s spice shop which was such an authentic added detail.

For me the power of the posal is that it's so personal. This is no last-minute Amazon purchase complete with guilt-induced gift wrapping. It may have taken the sender a lengthy thought process to choose the items enclosed and several shopping trips to gather them. They will have handled and packaged them themselves.

I’m not sure if it’s a uniquely feminine thing to gift with feeling in this way but the effect of both receiving and sending a posal is almost identical. It reinforces the connection you feel with the other person – and at its core it’s basically just a really nice thing to do. As Iris Murdoch is reported to have once said, 'nice things are nicer than nasty things'. Time for a trip to the Post Office.