Wish You Were Here

The picture postcard, long the staple of seaside holidays, with its bland coastal view and desperate platitudes about hotel, food, and weather, ought to be one of those long lost reminders of time past, totally supplanted by social media. Yet as recently as 2006, the number of cards being sent in Britain was actually increasing, with the Royal Mail delivering 135 million that year, 30 million more than in 2003. It may be that in the interim the numbers have dropped off somewhat (these were the latest figures I for postcard mailings I could find), and frankly it seems unlikely that anyone but the over 50's are still sending cards, but their longevity and popularity still surprise me, particularly when, now I have thought about it, I have neither sent nor received a holiday postcard for at least twenty years. And when we go on holiday, it never crosses my mind, or Val's mind, to send any cards - and I very much doubt it occurs to our daughters to do so.

Walk along any seafront, at home or abroad, and the souvenir shops are all stocking postcards, and presumably, people are still buying them, although my guess would be that many, if not most, are bought as keepsakes rather than being written and posted. Those who are buying them to send to friends and family are faced with those twin dilemmas; what to write and when to post. As a rule of thumb, the further you are from home, the earlier the card has to be sent, otherwise the chances are good that you will get home before the card does - and clearly, once you get half way through the holiday and no cards have been sent, then you aren't sending any. 

As to what to write, then writing your cards on day one, or day two, means there is little to write about beyond, "Hotel nice, weather nice, food nice. Wish you were here." But leave it too long and a more candid card might reveal, "Hotel full of drunks, got food poisoning from dodgy shellfish, rained three days on the trot, family at each other's throats. You're better off at home!" So uninspired was I when it came to card writing that I seriously contemplated having a rubber stamp made up with some stock phrases that I could emboss my cards with, because let's face it, what people write on postcards is pretty banal.

Plenty of cards on sale on Brighton seafront recently.

Around about the time I last sent a postcard the price of a First Class stamp was 26p, although a postcard had a special rate of 20p. Now it is 65p (no different for postcards) and for the average family, the cost of sending cards to friends, family and work colleagues probably exceeds the price of fish 'n' chips all round, another reason to upload a few pictures to Facebook with some suitably pithy comments instead. Postcard apps like TouchNote - over nine million cards sent since 2008 - have proven that people still like to send a physical card, although such apps represent an awkward half-way house between the technophile and the technophobe and are probably best for the tech savvy to send cards to members of the family who have so far eschewed the internet.

TouchNote is just one of several apps that allow you to send your own photos as a postcard.

Since postcards date back to the 1870's, conventional wisdom might suggest that with age comes value and that a card from the so-called Golden Age (1905-1915) might be worth collecting and, by extension, be quite valuable - except that during that period, Britons sent about 750 million postcards, or about 2 million per day! Hardly worth anything in terms of rarity value, then, with cards from that era typically only fetching a pound or two.  Postcards were, I suppose, the Edwardian equivalent of email. With the Royal Mail offering multiple collections and deliveries every day, (in 1889, Londoners received twelve deliveries a day) it was possible to send a card and receive an answer within the same day; asking for a response 'By Return Post' had a more literal meaning then than it does now.

We may think we live in frenetic times now, but for the Victorian and Edwardian gentlefolk, twelve posts a day - particular for those unused to them - must potentially have been a source of some stress. John Walker Harrington, writing in 1906 about the volume of postcards being sent in America, said, "Unless such manifestations are checked, millions of persons of now normal lives and irreproachable habits will become victims of faddy degeneration of the brain." The Lord alone knows what he would have made of email.

I started writing this with the apprehension that the postcard was in terminal decline, based solely on my own experience, and while the number of cards being sent is clearly nowhere near the peak of one-hundred or so years ago, the medium seems to be holding up well enough despite the obvious immediacy, ease, and versatility of the social media alternatives.

If you are still in the habit of sending postcards when you are on holiday, then good for you. If like me, you are out of the habit, perhaps now is the time to return to the practise, after all,

Facebook and the like are all very well, but a postcard carries a much more personal touch.