Wish I Was Still There
Why I buy postcards, but don’t send them to anyone.
It all started thirty-nine years ago on a school trip to France when I ran out of film for my camera. Unable to take any photos of the tourist attractions I was visiting, I began purchasing postcards of everywhere I went.
However, I soon realised that not only was collecting postcards easy to do but best of all it was also cheap. (Well, it was thirty-nine years ago!) Now, over 2,000 postcards later, I have a detailed collection of my travels over the past forty years.
It was a great hobby to start as a young boy because it was well within the means of my pocket money. I can still remember a family holiday in Eastbourne, where I bought most of my postcards there for as little as 3p each!
Inflation may have won the day since then, but the quality of the postcards on offer is far superior to that available when I started collecting all those years ago. And even these days, most postcards in the UK can still be bought for between 40 and 75 pence.
As someone who enjoys the outdoors and walking in the British countryside, it always amazes me how I can usually find a postcard of a point of interest, or view, that I’ve encountered en route, even though it may be miles from the nearest town or village.
I always try to buy a postcard wherever I go, and sometimes the hunt can be as exciting a challenge as actually obtaining the postcard. One of my more ‘unusual’ postcards includes St Olaf’s Church, Wasdale, Lake District, Cumbria.
Reputedly England’s smallest parish church, this sits at the foot of Great Gable, in the heart of the English Lake District, and more than five and a half miles from the nearest village. But I managed to buy a postcard of my visit because many churches in the UK sell postcards via an honesty box.
There can sometimes be another benefit of buying postcards. Often, the postcard offers a view or perspective that I can’t get as a tourist. I have a postcard of a car ferry called The Hengist. Now, this was the ferry that brought me back home from the French trip nearly forty years ago. Not only was I surprised that I could get a postcard of this ferry, but it had been taken from another boat in the English Channel at the time — something I couldn’t have done, had I wanted to take my own photo!
And, of course, the sun always shines in postcard pictures, unlike the weather when we go on our travels. So, whenever I flick back through my postcard collection, I always see the destinations in their best light. (My trip to North Yorkshire did not have anywhere near as great weather as these postcards would suggest!)
My collection tells two stories. Not only does it tell the story of my travels, but it also tells the story of me. It demonstrates the kind of person I am by the location of each of the postcards. I have a plethora of scenes from rural areas and very few from the cities. There are several sections in my binders that clearly identify areas that I have visited on more than one occasion, but I still explore new hidden corners of those areas I appear to know so well.
In fact, there are times when I go back to places and am delighted to find that some enterprising retailer now sells a postcard of a destination I may have visited a few years previously, but wasn’t able to buy at the time. So, I might buy a postcard of a destination several years after I visited it. As long as I have been there and don’t already have one, I’ll buy it to add to my collection.
At the moment, my collection is housed in a series of small ring binders. But one day, I plan to decorate a wall, if not a room, with them all.
And there’s something retrograde about a postcard. In the same way that many people don’t send postcards now (who needs to, we simply post an update on our social media pages, these days, don’t we?), there are times when I sit down, pluck a ring binder off the shelf and flick through the cards. I remember doing something similar many decades ago with photo albums. Scrolling throughout Google Photo archive isn’t quite the same, is it?
I don’t send postcards to people saying, “Wish you were here.” But I regularly look back through my collection and wish I was still there!
