The postcard trade is in terminal decline, this makes me sad. I know it's easier and cheaper to text/email but it's not the same. You don't have a lovely over saturated wide angled picture of the place you've been to to keep, nor does the text/email way result in you having to find out how you post things if you are abroad or go into a proper local heart of the community post office in you are in a tiny out of the way village somewhere in the UK. And of course the excitement of whether or not you'd be home before your postcards got to their recipients.
There is something exciting about receiving a postcard too and seeing a stamp from a far away part of the world you'll probably never visit yourself.
I love going to antique shops and looking through faded pics of places I've never been, looking at lovely old stamps, marvelling at the neatness of handwriting from yesteryear (though not all is legible) and that fact that they are mostly written in ink and not biro - and quite a lot in pencil.
Plus it's a brief tantalising glimpse into other people's lives - on the back of a black and white picture of a rather unpreposessing bridge over a what could be a stream or a small pond picture of Beckside Lane in Sedburgh, posted on Oct 18th 1909 is this message from M Pearce to Miss D Clark in Ormskirk in ornate black ink script -
' Hope you are quite well, and having better weather than we are. It has rained every day since we came back and a quarter of the term is over already.I am hoping to see Mother up here for the week-end. Love to all.'
I wonder where M Pearce was to be a quarter of the way through the term - boarding school somewhere? pupil or teacher? and what their relationship with Miss D Clark was - relative, friend, boy/girlfriend/ , lover? Did Mother make the trip and was it a successful one?
Some of the postcards I've got are just to arrange meetings - back in the day when there was more than one post delivery per day and the first was v early in the morning so you could use the post system as a way to organise your social life. I wouldn't use the post to do that now but I do still send postcards when I go away - I always send one to my parents and one to my own house too.
Aaah postcards :-)
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