Tech revolution is on the cards
SOMETHING remarkable happened the other day.
Someone sent me a postcard. I stood, bewildered by the strange yet familiar bit of card lying on the doormat. I could not have been more surprised had a Dodo popped through the letterbox.
Postcards are a thing from the Before Times. These days we post instant updates of our travels on Facebook or Insta or What’s App; inthe-moment memories beamed across the globe at the touch of a button and broadcast to our friends and relatives and the woman from down the road whose surname we’re not sure of.
But they’re a transient thing and oddly impersonal. Scroll on and they’re forgotten.
With social media there has been no careful choosing of an appropriate view or saucy joke from one of those rickety carousels. No sucking of Biros as we try to encapsulate our week in the sun into 50 words. No hunting for stamps and worrying whether the damn things would reach home before we did.
Unlike a Facebook status or Insta story, postcards are intimate, thoughtful and more permanent. Or at least they are in our house where, as one of life’s hoarders, I have dozens of the blighters going back decades.
Some, now yellow round the edges, were sent by my parents home to me from their regular hols in Blackpool (‘went for a walk on Prom after tea. Breezy’), others were posted by me back to them (‘Have run out of Hawaiian Tropic! Only 7 shots left on my roll of 36!’).
I have postcards from friends from long forgotten school trips and honeymoon destinations and back-packing adventures.
And then there are those I have bought myself, little reminders of a day out or weekend away that regularly still fall out of the back of novels where I’ve used them as bookmarks or surface like a little piece of the past from a forgotten drawer.
I even have a collection of black and white postcards, rescued from my childhood home, many featuring pictures of unknown sepia-coloured relatives.
Some of the images are taken in stiff-backed formal studios, others feature young men in khaki, the cramped handwriting on the back encouraging Alfred to be good for his mother.
There is even one with a dashing sailor pictured on the front, his Navy hat at a rakish angle. It’s addressed lovingly to my mum circa 1944, calls her ‘Darling Kathy’ and is signed ‘Peter’.
Who Peter was to her I’ll never know. But given she died 60 years after it was sent, it says something that she still kept his postcard.
These days, the idea of laboriously describing your holiday to the folks back home in words is almost unthinkable. We’re too busy having fun on the beach or photographing our cocktails.
But as the summer getaway looms – give or take cancelled flights and airports queues – maybe we should bring the tradition of the postcard back?
It’s a bit analogue, I grant you, but holidays are nothing if not an opportunity to take things a bit more slowly.
Even if that does mean texting your mates back home to double check their postcode.