‘Still no word of thanks. No letter, no email, no text. No acknowledgement that it even arrived. Did it arrive? Did I post it to the wrong postcode? Did I tap in the wrong account number? Of course it arrived. He just can’t be bothered to thank me. Such bad manners! I blame his mother for not bringing him up properly.’

These are the insomniac thoughts of the older generation as they try to come to terms with the younger generation’s bewildering non-thanking habit. The silence of early January, the non-landing of letters from grandchildren and godchildren on the mat, the non-pinging of affectionate emails of gratitude, really pains them, brought up as they were on the belief that writing thank-you letters is good manners, and good manners mean everything.

As soon as parental control loosens, thank-you letter writing goes the way of shoe polishing and toenail cutting

I asked a cohort of grandparents and godparents in their sixties, seventies and eighties about their experiences of the younger generation’s etiquette of thanking, and the response was overwhelmingly along the lines of: ‘I’m grateful these days if I get any written thanks from my grandchildren or godchildren in any form. It certainly doesn’t need to be a handwritten letter.’ ‘They don’t, on the whole, register thanks. This I lament,’ said one. ‘Rare to get any response at all, even for quite large 21st-birthday cheques,’ said another. ‘Astonishing how godchildren don’t thank.’ ‘I think our elder lot of grandchildren (when still under parental control) were the last children in England to write thank-you letters for Christmas presents.’ These people have learned to be pathetically grateful for any crumb of acknowledgement from the young darlings, who might have bothered to move their thumbs enough to tap the text: ‘Thanks for the lovely present, I really look forward to spending it xx.’

Gone, it seems, are the days of agonised New Year’s Day pen-sucking, when those of us brought up in the 20th century had to sit in front of a blank sheet of headed writing paper, trying to think of something nice to say about the masonry drill or the cassette case, whether we liked them or not, and remembering the rules: never begin with the words ‘thank you’ (too predictable); always go on to the second side; at the very least, express thanks and add ‘one other piece of news’; always use a first-class stamp. It was never fun, but for those half-hours we were actively thinking of the giver, forcing ourselves to dream up words and information they might be gratified to hear.

Today’s under-12s are still under parental control enough to put up with this annual agony, but the habit and sense of duty clearly aren’t being drilled into them brutally enough, because as soon as parental control loosens, thank-you letter writing goes the way of shoe polishing and toenail cutting.

One respondent said to me: ‘This year I’ve decided I’m not giving presents to any godchild who didn’t thank me last year. I have six godchildren and am only sending one present this year.’ That’s the sanction the older generation has up its sleeve: withdrawal of beneficence. Does such a drastic measure serve the non-thankers right? I asked the question to The Spectator’s Dear Mary, Mary Killen, herself an assiduous writer of thank-you cards and emails. She said she’d recently met a man who’d told her that his godson had sent him a text just saying ‘Thnx’, after he’d got him a job. ‘Which effectively means he won’t be helping him again.’

‘It hasn’t sunk into the young, who are in other ways really nice people,’ said Mary, ‘that in the generation above them, who hold all the money and the power, it is a real black mark not to write and thank for things. By not thanking, they are micro-spoiling the life of the benefactor by leaving them in a void of waiting. Just as young people crave “likes” on Instagram, the older generation want feedback and endorsement if they have given a present or party, so if they hear nothing at all, it’s a bit of a micro-aggression.’

Perhaps the effect of written thanks has been so debased by the endless corporate thanks pouring into our phones (‘Thank you for being our valued customer’, ‘Thank you for choosing us. Please let us know how we did’) that people in their twenties have no craving for the word ‘thank you’, and see no reason why anyone else would. Not that some of them don’t write marvellous thank-you emails; I’ve been shown a few, by friends who have recently received them, and the best ones are brimming with liveliness and gratitude. Emails do seem to flow better than letters; one older man I asked said he actively preferred thank-you emails as they were ‘immediate and full of the life of the party’, while letters could be more stale and stilted. The downside to thank-you emails, though, is that they demand a response: a thanks for the thanks, whereas with a handwritten letter, the case is closed.

The tradition of thank-you letter writing is still very much alive among the over–sixties, some of whom write ‘by return of post’ and listen to the alarming sound of their thank-you letter falling into the bottom of the almost-empty pillar box, signalling the dying of the art. Nicholas Coleridge, one of the most punctilious thankers I know, tells me: ‘My normal practice is to write all thank-you letters the next morning and post them in the so-called priority postbox. A handwritten thank you should be one and a half to two sides, and should show evidence of paying attention by referencing actual conversation, jokes, activities or anecdotes from the evening or weekend. Sometimes we receive thank-you letters from friends of our children which begin, “Thank you for inviting me to stay for the Bank Holiday at your house Wolverton Hall near Pershore in Worcestershire”, like a police witness statement.’

The arbiter of taste Nicky Haslam agrees. ‘We storytellers want a story, or even a drawing. It’s not enough to say “thank you for a lovely evening”. An email is fine, as long as there’s something specific and funny in it.’

‘And your godchildren?’ I asked him. ‘Do they write to thank you for presents?’

‘I don’t think they know how to write,’ he said. ‘And they’re all much too busy getting divorced.’