The last time I got a postcard the price of the stamp was 3d.

No one sends them anymore – not even the ones featuring very small men with wives with enormous, Pamela Anderson-like chests, looking at marrows or any odd-shaped vegetable mentioning its size etc.

As a kid, during the summer, I had two great aunts who, upon their arrival in Ilfracombe (might have been Pluto for all I knew, it sounded so far away from Balham), would write to me using every conceivable space on the card.  There would always be a picture of the beach – not a sniff of a giant marrow 😊

It was lovely to receive, but the quid pro quo was that you had to send them back and would be forced by elder relatives – seemingly for the entire duration of the holiday – to write them.

“Wish you were here” being the obvious inclusion: but, however large you wrote it, it wasn’t covering the entire message area.   So I would lie and write about the remains of a pterodactyl I’d found on Dungeness beach and wouldn’t be able to write a second card due to having been abducted by Ellen Terry (we were forced to visit her house in Kent one year).  So, when I returned, having been released by the leading 19^th theatre actress, some aging relatives were quite surprised.

And the weather; you’d be in the same country and the weather probably similar, but you were, because you were British, obliged to mention it.  You said it was hot, but then you’d never travelled to the Sahara Desert, the Grand Canyon or Mars.

I’d send more postcards, except they cost more than 3d to post and my marrows aren’t at their best in this cold weather. �