I sometimes muse about life in that distant age before ATMs and mobiles. When I started travelling — student flights on a Comet 4c and a tent in my backpack — I took travellers' cheques and a phone call home required queuing for a suffocating cabin in a Post Office.
Now my children don't even use the word 'mobile'. To them it's just a phone: there isn't any other sort. And if money doesn't grow on trees, it certainly comes out of holes in the wall.
I'm not saying it was better then. We are better off now in every way. But there is one thing travellers have lost — the simple pleasure of writing postcards.
It was a standard rite of being abroad: a trip to buy a bunch of cards. Stamps had to be bought in tobacconists. Or maybe that was just in France. Then settle into a café to perform two epistolary tasks: the gratification of anxious parents and the annoyance of jealous friends.
This is now nearly a thing of the past. A TripAdvisor survey showed that just 11 per cent of travellers still send postcards home while 60 per cent use text.
Like the ashtray, which faces extinction because of smoking laws, the postcard is a minor art form that struggles to survive. Facebook, email, texting and tweeting have deskilled communications and impoverished our visual culture. But no new medium has ever completely succeeded its predecessor and the easier it becomes to send electronic tosh, the better will be appreciated the charm of a well-written postcard. Generally speaking, the easier it is to communicate, the less art goes into the communication.
Postcards were patented in the US in 1861. In 1894 the Royal Mail allowed picture postcards in Britain. The growth of the postcard describes exactly the growth in popular travel with all its yearnings and aspirations. Archives of postcards are pop history at its most evocative. Between 1900 and 1960 you can trace the broadening of the traveller's horizon from black-and-white Frinton-on-Sea to polychrome Rio, as jet turbines replaced steam boilers as sources of locomotive energy.
