Team Twitter reunites woman with a letter sent to her by a famous poet
Sometimes, just sometimes, Twitter isn't a terrible wasteland of Very Bad Things™.
Indeed, sometimes the internet rallies together to help people and reunite them with possessions they've lost.
That's certainly what happened when Stewart Law, who lives in Belfast, asked Twitter for a helping hand in getting a letter back to its rightful owner. To his delight, Twitter delivered — in fewer than 30 minutes, no less.
It started on Tuesday, when Law tweeted that he'd found a letter penned by Irish poet Seamus Heaney inside a second-hand book many years ago.
"I wonder if the owner would like it back?" he asked.
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Here's a close up of the letter:
Not long after, Law reported back that he'd located the owner with the help of Queen's University Belfast's special collections library.
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The owner of the letter, Sophia Hillan, replied to Law's tweet saying: "Yes, it was to me!"
"I am the Sophia Hillan who was at Irish Studies and would love to have it back," she wrote. "I am pleased and touched that the finder thought to contact me. Seamus was a kind and loyal friend until his untimely death."
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Three cheers for the internet!
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
