The 'Endangered, Subversive' Postcard

From In our age of privacy the postcard is an endangered, subversive species :

Suggesting that postcards are, in fact, sufficiently alive to be dangerous would be more effective. Floating a rumour that the government wanted to ban them because, say, terrorists were using them in preference to email or mobiles, and low standards in schools meant MI5 couldn't read their handwriting - that would confer upon the postcard the aura of subversion its salvation requires.

It would be wrong to be nostalgic about a golden age of postcards to the extent of scorning their usurpers, the email and the text message. In this country it is the continuously murmuring prose haiku dialogue of the SMS, rather than the email, which has supplanted the ink and paper billets-doux of lovers from the days when the post came and went many times a day; it is the words that matter. The virtue of the postcard is in the medium rather than the message and its peculiarities mean it will endure, however reduced, as long as the world's postal services are prepared to deliver any piece of paper, cloth, card or plastic with a stamp and an address on.

It was an ordinary-extraordinary set of technological feats that enabled me, a couple of weeks ago, to sit in a hotel room in Australia and receive, from my brother in Germany, emailed 3D photographs of his unborn child. I barely begin to understand the science which made this possible, whereas I know, more or less, how a postcard gets delivered. But it still seems a marvel to me that I can sit here at my table, scrawl a message on a bit of card, stick a 34p stamp on it, walk across the road, put the card in a slot, and be fairly sure that tomorrow morning, that same bit of card will be in my parents' house in Dundee.

The same digital technology that threatens to be the postcard's undoing can, of course, be the remaking of it. I like to print out a photograph on an A4 piece of paper, write a letter on the back, then divide it into four postcard-shaped pieces, put an address and stamp on each, and post them to the recipient, who re-assembles the four parts to read the letter and see the picture. It's probably not a technique you'd use to communicate with your bank manager, or anyone short on patience, but it has possibilities. I've found that if you post all four postcards, addressed to the same person, in the same post box, at the same time, the four cards will invariably arrive on different days. Some people would put this down to incompetence on the part of the Royal Mail; I like to attribute it to a romantic postman, entering into the spirit of teasing the recipient, or to a cynical mail sorter, outraged by the pretentiousness of the concept. Either way, it implies dependence on the random, individual human element, so odious to the corporate mind, which is part of the postcard's charm. More than that: it exposes both sender and recipient to the most genuinely subversive and exciting aspect of the postcard, which is that anyone - the postman, the sorter, the recipient's flatmate or partner - can read it. In an age obsessed with privacy, there is nothing more defiantly rebellious than letting strangers read your personal messages.

Champions of the postcard like to stress how good it is to get one, but for me, it is more joy to send than to receive. It's never convenient, quick or easy to send a postcard. All the arcane elements - the card, the stamp, the pen, the address, the message, the postbox - need to be painstakingly brought together. In the email age, successfully sending a postcard gives you a rush of gratification equivalent to lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

Setting out to send a postcard while abroad, in particular, is a journey of cultural discovery to which sitting in your hotel room, tapping on a laptop to justify the amount your hosts have gouged you for a broadband connection, cannot compare. Some years ago an Italian friend in Edinburgh found that, in order for her postcards to reach their intended destination, it was necessary to post them in the tall, red, glossy boxes with narrow slots, and not in the squat, white and black boxes with generous, gaping slots marked "LITTER".