On the noticeboard above my desk, in among my daughter’s early doodles, family photos, and an abundance of Matt cartoons, is one of my all-time favourite Letters to the Editor.

“Yesterday, at lunch,” wrote one Ione Carver, from Guildford, “the waiter serving me was moving away quickly, and I needed to tell him we had no salt. I put my hand on the bare flesh of his arm. I am 102, and I am concerned that in 15 years, if this comes out, I may be asked to leave the retirement home in which I live.”

It’s a work of art – indisputably. But what I love most of all about the letter is what it tells me about you, the reader. Columnists don’t write in a vacuum. They can’t. And the fresh, wry, witty, and revealing insights that land in my inbox daily don’t just confirm or challenge our opinions: they inform them in the most valuable way. So when you preface your letters and messages, as one lady recently did, “As an ordinary but caring member of the public, my voice will not make a difference,” you are wrong. This year, here is what I have learned from you.

First and foremost, you care viscerally and passionately about British values. And the notion of your cultural identity being eroded by the likes of the British Council, which as I wrote earlier this month, would like to veto the use of the word “Brits” alongside terms such as “the Queen’s English”, makes your blood pressure soar like nothing else.

Over the course of 2021, many of you have gone from “amused” to “concerned” to “terrified” of what has plainly become “a stealth attack on free speech.” Today, you have reached breaking point. You have had it. You “will not be shouted down by the wokies” or the “virtue-signalling planks” any longer. Indeed, one reader suggested they should “be rounded up for immediate deportation if they are so ashamed of the country in which they live.”

You would collectively like to mount a “Melt The Snowflakes” campaign, complete “with T-shirts and banners.” Not because you have written off a whole generation of youngsters who have fetishised “offence” to such a degree that British universities are now in danger of becoming “institutions of lower learning” where intolerance is coddled and promoted, but because you know from your children and grandchildren that they have “much more to offer the world than puritanical peevishness.” That, as one reader put it so touchingly, “there is a whole world of humour and joy out there that youngsters are cutting themselves off from.” But however loud some of those voices are, a whole swathe of society “must not and cannot be tarred with the same snowflake brush.”

You are tolerant of everything… except intolerance. You have “nothing against teenagers querying their gender,” and support trans rights, but believe that “bombarding schoolchildren [as young as four] with complex subjects which they don’t have the maturity or expertise to understand or deal with,” can be deeply damaging, and that alongside maths and, yes, the Queen’s English, schools should focus less on identity and more on “teaching basic behavioural principles which children can take into older life, so that they do not enter into lives of drugs, crime, domestic abuse and so on.”

You are so over “Sussexit”, or whatever we’re supposed to call it. But for most of you that Oprah interview back in March – the one filmed on the day Prince Philip was admitted to hospital – killed off any residual goodwill towards “the least private Royals in living memory”. And rightly or wrongly, many of you blame Meghan: a name that now seems to come with eye-roll attached.

You may no longer be Oprah’s biggest fans, but in these isolated times you have found solace in TV, whether it be Strictly Come Dancing, Planet Earth, Bake Off, or indeed the new Sex and the City reboot, which may have saved one reader’s daughter’s life. Hours after watching the death of Carrie Bradshaw’s husband, Mr Big, one Josephine Fawkes “was wakened at 2am with a pain in her chest and arm. Had she not watched Mr. Big she would not have realised that she was having a heart attack,” her mother shared. “Her family will forever be grateful to And Just Like That…”

You are an inherently optimistic bunch – about 2022 and beyond – and intend to “gather ye rosebuds where ye may.” So when I get too “hell-in-a-handcarty” and start channelling my inner Victor Meldrew, you are quick to slap me down. “Rationality will prevail”, “the dial will right itself” and the “pendulum swing back” – though not before “it has taken down a statue or two”, and “perhaps not all the way”. Which is no bad thing. Because the sweet spot, surely, “is that place of common sense in between.”