I like to receive postcards.  When most of my mail arrives in boring white or manila DL envelopes, with my name and address appearing bureaucratically typed through a small transparent window, to receive a colourful A6 piece of cardboard, handwritten, often with an exotic foreign stamp on the back of it, is genuinely exciting.

So, I was pleased when I spotted, lying on my doormat, the small card with photos of Paris on the front of it.  Instantly, it raised a series of thoughts and questions.  Who of my friends has just been to Paris?  Nice of them to think of me.  Wonder if they’re having a good time?  That’s a funny-looking stamp.  Hasn’t Mike’s handwriting improved.

But then I looked again and realised that Mike’s handwriting hadn’t improved.  In fact, it wasn’t his writing at all, although it was his name at the end of the message.  The postcard had been written by a machine, digitally-generated, and automatically dispatched to a selection of names and addresses from Mike’s online mailing list.  In fact, it had never been in Mike’s hand once.  It was computer-generated.

Realising this fact made me review some of my initial responses upon receiving the card.  The stamp wasn’t funny-looking because it was from a foreign destination, pressed onto the top, right-hand corner of the card by Mike’s thumb; no, it was funny-looking because it had whirred off the production line of the franking machine in the digital postcard company.  And had Mike actually been thinking of me when he sent the card?  Not a great deal, I suspect.  The message wasn’t personalised; it would have been the same wording to all the members on his list; my name and address merely added by a mail-merge programme.  How much thought goes into that?  And Paris?  Was Mike even in Paris?  He could have selected the photo on the front of the card whilst he was sitting on his sofa at home in Guildford.

All things considered, I rather wished Mike hadn’t sent me the card at all.  It had raised my enthusiasm, only to have it dampened.

Now, I know it can be a hassle buying postcards on holiday; sometimes a trial to think up something original and witty to say on each one of them; even more bother to track down a post office, and expensive to buy stamps, but that is precisely what makes it special when you receive one.  Because you know that someone has ruined half their holiday, chasing around on a series of boring admin tasks, in order to send a postcard to show that for a few precious minutes they were actually thinking of you.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree needs a holiday.