THE letter is not dead. That was the message I received during my visit to the Royal Mail Delivery Office in Devizes this month to see the changes being taken to improve efficiency across the postal service.

As your MP I receive and send thousands of letters each year and I am always enthralled to see the amount of human intelligence that goes into the sorting process.

A letter addressed to “That MP, Claire, Devizes” would likely make it to my local office – although it is easier for all if correspondence is properly addressed.

I also went to a conference in Tidworth in September where I worked with people from Wiltshire Council, local housing agencies, home builders and the South West Housing Initiative on ways to deliver more affordable and rented housing that complements rather than challenges our towns and villages.

With over 10,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list this is a problem that we need to solve.

I also packed up my collection of brightly coloured jackets and headed to Birmingham for the Conservative Party Conference where as well as the big set-piece speeches and “BoJo” mania, I met party members from across the UK and explored the new ideas and energy fizzing at all levels in the party.

At the end of it I seem to have walked miles in heels, spoken at several fringe events on green growth, infrastructure, child poverty and childcare and done several lively TV and radio programmes.

I was therefore extremely happy to get home to Wiltshire but then remembered with trepidation that I had been persuaded to run the Chalke Valley 10K last Sunday so I swapped heels for trainers and puffed up the hills.

All that can be said about my performance is that I wasn’t (quite) last.