The postcard is dead... but gloating is alive and well, it’s just moved to Instagram
I’VE been overcome by a wave of nostalgia for the lost art of postcard-writing after hearing the sad news that one of the last iconic postcard publishers, J Salmon, is shutting up shop.
It’s hardly surprising, in this era of instant and endless communication, that the family run British firm, which has been in business for more than a centuryand-a-half, has found itself struggling to make ends meet.
The owners blamed changing holiday patterns and the rise of social media for killing off their market and they’re so right: postcards belong to the era of old-fashioned holidays, when you’d disappear entirely for a leisurely two weeks in sunnier climes.
Once departed, you might as well have gone to the moon as far as your loved ones were concerned and the only effective way you had of letting them know that you were still alive was by dispatching a postcard.
Of course, taking a full two-week break meant that you had 14 long days in which to luxuriate in doing nothing, and therefore didn’t resent wasting several hours selecting the perfect jaunty card and then traipsing endlessly around the local village in search of first a stamp and then a postbox.
Those days are long gone – and in this era of hurried minibreaks and short-haul dashes for five nights in the sun, you’d be home before your postcard had even left the postal depot.
Of course, in the meantime you’d have been in near constant communication with everyone back home through several forms of social media and multiple daily text messages.
We’re so connected these days that it usually feels like you were never away in the first place.
Still, the demise of the postcard is a shame for the terminally smug among us, who loved the ritualistic gloating involved.
The urge to remind everyone at home that you were lying by the pool sipping pina coladas while they trudged through the rain en route to work was irresistible.
Great care would go into the composition of the message: it had to be upbeat and breezy – you wanted the reader to picture you swanning around in a kaftan living your best life on a faraway paradise island – but it also had to be brief, otherwise people would suspect you had nothing better to be doing and conclude that you couldn’t be having that much fun after all. Having a great time! you’d write. Food to die for! Hotel first-class! Weather amazing! And so on, leaving out the fact that your apartment on the 20th floor of a Benidorm high-rise had a nasty cockroach infestation, your children had virulent sunburn and you were bedbound with a dodgy tummy brought on by all the iffy foreign food. These days, of course, the postcard may be a thing of the past but the urge to gloat remains as strong as ever. It’s just migrated to Instagram, where you can upload a strategically edited picture of your bronzed lower limbs and immaculately painted toenails against a backdrop of the azure blue waters of the hotel pool. Top it off with multiple irritating hashtags like #holidays #family #sunset #poolside #lovelife and #blessed, and your smugness levels will hit 10. Just make sure the sunburnt children are firmly out of shot.