Modern Life: What is postcrossing?
In 1840, the writer Theodore Hook decided he needed cheering up. He painted an image on a small piece of light card, wrote a message, affixed a Penny Black and sent it to himself. So was born the postcard and, despite a huge range of other ways of communicating, it survives today and is thriving in a most exhilarating way.
This new lease of life is thanks to Paulo Magalhães, a computer engineer, who decided to put together the good old postcard and the power of the internet. He called his project ‘postcrossing’ and described it thus: ‘Send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!’
It works like this. You go to the website, get an ID and a random name, address and biog. You send your postcard to that stranger. They receive it and let the site know. And you’re up and running, able to send postcards all round the world and to receive them, too.
You are now part of a postcrossing community that will number getting on for a million people by the time you read this. More than 50 million postcards have been sent; at any one time there are 400,000 postcards in transit.
So why on earth is it so popular? It’s part of a movement that wants to do
something authentic and to reach beyond anodyne emails. It attracts people who want to learn English, are lonely and want human contact. Many say it feels like a travel experience – they receive cards from places they’d never visit and learn something about those places. Above all, the whole ethos thrives on kind-heartedness, warmth and generosity – things we’d all like to see a lot more of.
And then there’s the act of writing – with a pen on paper. There’s something special about the good old postcard. It’s the same impulse that Theodore Hook acted on – he just wanted to write something and receive something in the post.
I have a very personal reason to thank the postcard. My mother was from a middle-class family and, like many young women of her era, she would write to soldiers as a pen pal. Her postcard reached my father, who was on active service. The problem was that he couldn’t read or write. He’d left school at 13 to support his family in the East End. My dad called in the services of his commanding officer, who wrote a series of beautiful postcards back to my mum. Yes, it was very Cyrano de Bergerac. My mum was smitten.
When dad got back, they married and I resulted. In a beautiful twist, my mum taught my dad to read and write through doing crosswords.
The movement can only grow. You are free to say what you want and write to whomever you like. The charm is in being in touch with people you’d never normally be in touch with. If you join, you might even get to send a postcard to Afghanistan – although it has only eight members there. One wonders about the life of those Afghan members, wanting to hear from somewhere where the bombs don’t drop.