Times change, but I still mourn the loss of the human touch

What do the following have in common: a holiday postcard, a supermarket queue and a church organ? It sounds like a riddle, but it is actually a straightforward question with a melancholy answer: all are endangered species.

Britain’s oldest postcard publisher, J Salmon of Sevenoaks, has announced that it is to close, its market blighted by social media and changing holiday habits. As the postcard vanishes into the realm of the forgotten, the supermarket queue is poised to follow. Earlier this month Sainsbury’s tested a shopping app at its Euston Station branch: customers could use their smartphones to scan their shopping and have the cost of their purchases deducted directly from their bank accounts. “Some of the people in the trial left the store feeling very smug because there was a long line of people waiting to pay and they didn’t have to join it,” said Dan Hill, who led the team that developed the app.

For most of us, I suppose, concern for the wellbeing of church organs comes fairly low on our list of anxieties – somewhere below the killer whale and the red squirrel. But not for Martin Renshaw, a musician and organ restorer who last week organised a conference to consider the plight of unwanted church organs – currently being discarded, he told BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, at the rate of one a week.

The common thread that unites these very disparate entities is that of human connection – a brief turning of the gaze outwards. Texting your mum with a selfie from the Grand Canyon might seem to fulfil exactly the same function as sending her a postcard – with a lot less faff about finding a stamp and remembering the postcode – but there is a nuance of difference. The postcard – “wish you were here” – signifies that we were thinking about its recipient; the selfie, that we were thinking mostly about ourselves.

Time-poor and frantic as we all are, the elimination of the supermarket queue (not to mention the peril of being called “sweetheart” by the checkout staff, an unsanctioned endearment that recently sent a Tesco customer into a tremendous huff) might seem an unmitigated Good Thing. But for anyone leading a solitary existence – young mothers, the elderly, people who work from home – the fleeting moment of human contact at the checkout can sweeten an entire day.

As for church organs, Renshaw chronicles a cascade of consequential losses, from choristers to composers, noting that other countries, from France to Sweden, are keen to adopt our unwanted instruments. Recently in France, an entire community became involved in the restoration of an 1832 organ rescued from a church in Cumbria. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis and all that. Our children will miss postcards, supermarket queues and church organs no more than we now regret the loss of conversational Latin and quill pens.

Some young artist of the digital age is surely compiling a dossier of selfies to match the magnificent postcard collections of the artist Tom Phillips and the photographer Martin Parr; the internet offers a chronicle of human eccentricity as singular as anything to be heard in a supermarket queue; and composers and choristers, who existed before the ubiquity of the church organ, will doubtless survive its demise.

Nevertheless, their passing leaves its trace: a small but significant diminishment of the richness of everyday life.