The family group chat is chaos. It’s also a record of people who love you, typed badly.

Behind the forwarded pictures and the eleven separate messages that could have been one is a group of people checking that you are alive. Affection does not always arrive in a format you would have designed. Often it arrives as a blurry photo of a dog nobody asked about, sent at six in the morning.

Reply to something in there this week instead of leaving it sitting. One line is plenty. Screenshot a thread you would hate to lose, because chats disappear along with phones, and that one turns out to be a record of something.