Following my piece about communication, a reader has contacted me about the seeming inability of some public bodies to respond to complaints or requests for information.

She was unfortunate enough to be a passenger on a bus travelling towards Brighton along London Road when it was forced to make a sharp emergency stop near St Bernadette's School.

No complaints about that. She appreciated the driver had to respond to the situation.

What she did question, however, was the design of the bus seating which seems to have exposed her to considerable risk, given the abruptness of the stop.

She was sitting on an aisle seat with nothing in front of her as the next row of seats ran along the side of the bus, rather than facing the front, as hers did.

The two seats beside her had a bar in front and the passengers seated there were able to grab it and save themselves from being shot forward on impact.

She, on the other hand, had no such protection and was thrown out of her seat straight down the centre of the bus. Two other passengers suffered a similar fate.

My correspondent was bruised and shaken, which was bad enough, but her main concern was for a small child in a buggy immediately in front of her and whom she only avoided hitting with great difficulty.

She also made the point that, had she been an elderly passenger, she could have suffered serious damage from the force of the impact and would have been unlikely to have had the strength to avoid the child.

She wrote to the bus company to point out what had occurred. She had no thoughts of asking for any compensation but felt she had a valid point.

After five weeks she received no reply and, not unnaturally, felt aggrieved that no one had the courtesy to acknowledge her letter.

Judging by the letters one reads in The Argus, it is not unusual to have correspondence with public bodies ignored, in spite of the fact there is supposed to be a standard response time.

Perhaps someone should tell the director of the bus company that includes his organisation. No doubt there is a good explanation, like the post office strike, but somehow I doubt it.

When I was a small girl, Boxing Day was the day on which we were settled down after lunch to write letters to all those who had remembered us at Christmas.

Until the dreaded letters were written, the Laws of the Medes and Persians could not have been stricter. No letter, no playing. Sadly these days you are doing well if you get a brief phone call or possibly an email which has most likely been duplicated to all and sundry.

I was somewhat surprised recently when, after I had sent a birthday card and a gift of money to a 14-year-old boy, I got a phone call, not from him but from his mother, thanking me for his present!

What sort of standards are we setting for our children if we do not teach them the common courtesies of life? It is so nice, but less and less usual these days, to get a little note, however brief, after a dinner party or a day out.

Good manners are the social oil that keeps the wheels turning smoothly and life is a good deal poorer when they are missing.

My other pet hate, while we are on the subject of communicating, is people who do not reply to invitations by the requested date. I always suspect they are waiting to see if a better offer comes in the next post.

If you are trying to organise a function, it can be very frustrating to balance hope with experience over numbers and come out on the winning side.

Let's have a Year of the Letter Writer and see if we can't convince more people the pen is mightier than thought transference!