London

In June 2013 a five-year-old boy, Toby Little, was walking home from school contemplating the long summer ahead. Money was tight that year — his mother, Sabine, had been made redundant from her job at the University of Sheffield following the financial crash — and Toby’s parents had told him they would not be able to afford a holiday.

Instead of dreaming about foreign travel, he had been reading a book, Letter to New Zealand, written by the children’s author Alison Hawes, where she explains what happens in an envelope’s journey from England to the other side of the world.

As they neared their house, Toby asked his mum if he too could write a letter to New Zealand. After a few more steps he was struck by an even better idea. “Can I write a letter to every country in the world?”

Three years on, sipping tea in the living room of their family home in the village of Bolsterstone, near Sheffield, on the edge of the Peak District, Sabine, 40, says she often wonders what would have happened if she had replied differently that day. “It was just one of those typical questions that five-year-olds have,” she says.

“If he had asked me in the evening when I was knackered I might have refused. But as parents you realise there’s a lot of power in just allowing kids to have a go. Also, it seemed a nice way to do some armchair exploration. So I told him let’s see how far you get.”

Prolific pen

The answer, it transpires, was very far indeed. Toby has since written and posted letters to all 193 UN member states, as well as numerous other obscure overseas territories including the Pitcairn Islands (a British colony settled in the Pacific by the HMS Bounty mutineers), French Polynesia and even the Vatican. To date he has written 681 letters — the best of which have been selected to appear in a new book called Dear World, How Are You?, which is published by Penguin — although so prolific is Toby’s pen the number will have risen by now.

“Writing these letters has made me realise that the world isn’t actually all that big,” he says with a grin. It does not take long in Toby’s company to be utterly disarmed by his enthusiasm. During the course of our hour-long interview, he shifts positions from an exercise bike, to peering out through his father’s telescope (Nigel, 44, is a mobile phone games developer), to wielding his lightsabre, to showing off his mineral collection, to pointing out countries on his globe, to clambering across the beams in the kitchen.

He is bright, engaged and full of questions of his own. It is no surprise that so many people from all walks of life have become swept up in his project. On the living room table is an envelope that recently arrived from Bhutan, containing a letter written by two brothers.

Next to it is a piece of mail bearing a rather more regal postmark — signed by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and thanking Toby for inquiring about Princess Charlotte. That first letter he wrote three years ago was not, in fact, to New Zealand, but a town called Volcano in Hawaii. Toby, who is an only child, had sat at home with his mother and picked five countries he liked the sound of. She then wrote a post on her Facebook page asking whether any friends could help them with addresses and the offers came flooding in. “At first it was just friends,” says Sabine, who now works back at the University of Sheffield as a lecturer. “Then it was friends of friends. And then it completely and utterly took on a life of its own. After about four months the project suddenly went viral and we had thousands of people wanting Toby to write to them.”

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2016