Wish you were here: postcards belong in the present, not the past
When did you last send a postcard? You are an upstanding Sunday Telegraph reader, so it was probably last week on a golfing holiday in the Algarve. But I can’t remember the last time I scribbled, “Very burned and have eaten too much” on the back of a card and, five days later, remembered to stick it into a foreign postbox.
The reason for asking is I was recently invited to take part in a podcast called Postcard from the Past,
a show that asks its guests to sift through their old postcards and bring two into the studio to discuss. In preparation, I spent some happy hours looking through a box of mine that smelled of dust and memories. For how much more evocative are the details of a postcard than an old photo.
You may vaguely remember the picture of the front of a sunset, a mountain or an animal in a hat. The familiar handwriting on the back makes you smile, especially if the sender is no longer around. Even the address at which it was sent to you can provoke an emotion, good or bad.
On Christmas Day in 1995, Dad sent me a postcard of Luxor Temple from Egypt, where he was on honeymoon with my stepmother. “Happy Christmas. My beard is a huge joke and looks ghastly,” he wrote, having decided that his honeymoon was the perfect moment to try a natty new look. On the back of a card sent to me at boarding school during a visit to York, my little brother detailed his breakfast in small, wobbly letters: “This morning we had bacon, eggs, fried bread, toast and black pudding – YUK!”
My much-loved, much-missed grandmother’s tended to be more educational. “Darling Soph, do you remember you drew hands with me one day?” she wrote in a card sent from Florence. “This is a study of hands by one of the greatest artists who lived, Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian who lived in the 15th century (before Henry VIII).” In the same way that you hear a forgotten song or catch a whiff of someone’s scent and are snatched back in time, these cards evoke very specific snippets of life. It made me quite tearful.
The podcast was launched by a man called Tom Jackson, who works Back in time: a seaside postcard posted in September 1924 from Blackpool
in advertising by day but, a few years ago, started uploading the odd card on Twitter. “Not for their collectable beauty but simply because I had one or two knocking about the house and the messages intrigued me,’” he says. It developed from there and Tom started collecting postcards wherever he could find them (he now has more than 50,000 in his garage), uploading them with a few lines from the back. In one of a Cambridge church, the sender says, “I was sorry to hear of Elvis’s death as I know you liked him very much. Hope you haven’t forgotten to water my plants.” “Jackie got stung by a wasp didn’t we know it,” says someone else in a card illustrated by scenes from Weymouth.
They’re cheerful snapshots and I can’t recommend the Twitter account or Tom’s accompanying book enough. It’s also made me more determined to send postcards again. In 2017, Britain’s oldest postcard publisher closed because holiday pictures texted via WhatsApp or uploaded to social media had driven it out of business. But I’d much rather have a card of the Cornish coastline – captioned simply: “No tea cosies in our guesthouse at all” – than see yet another infinity pool on Instagram.