Blast from the past: postcards

This is a postcard sent to my family from my globe-trotting late aunt Kathleen in the early 1970s.

She was in Moscow and Leningrad (now, of course, St Petersburg) and wrote, “It is really interesting. The weather is beautiful and we are with a very jolly crowd.”

I have quite a few of her postcards sent from various places including Denmark, Italy, the Algarve and the USA. The are kept in a box and smell of dust and memories.

It was always a thrill to receive one of aunt Kathleen’s postcards, to stare at the photographs of exotic places, to feel a little envious of her travels, to dream of going to those places myself one day.

On holidays many of us will pass a stand with postcards, but will we buy one, find somewhere to buy a stamp, then a postbox? Probably not. It all seems like too much effort and too arcane when we can simply take a photo on our phone and send a message instantaneously.

But to receive a postcard is a lovely thing. It suggests effort and thought.

Looking at old postcards conjures up memories of that person. My aunt’s familiar cursive handwriting on the back makes me smile, especially since she is no longer around. It’s not the picture on the front of the card, whether of a cityscape or a donkey smoking a pipe, but the thought behind it all.

Even if all that is written is: ‘Weather is beautiful, wish you were here’, or as one wit wrote once ‘Weather is here, wish you were beautiful’, postcards will always have my stamp of approval.