postcard from wrabness

Besides the Christmas cards, yesterday's post brought a postcard sized shiny photograph of three pointed gables, decorated with black and white triangles and dramatically side lit against a pale blue sky.  Turning it over I saw my name and address printed below a facsimile of a Christmas stamp and a Guernsey postmark.  On the left hand side of the card where traditionally one writes a message was a short printed one.  For a microsecond my brain wondered what it was trying to sell, before grasping that it wasn't some kind of personalised marketing shot, and was in fact from a friend.  She'd mentioned the last time we met that she was going to walk her dog via the Grayson Perry house at Wrabness, and the triangular patterned gables must be part of the house, since the message read Visited the edifice by Grayson Perry today.  It looked good in the sunlight.

It did look good too.  The house is hired out as a one of a kind holiday let, and I don't believe it has a gift shop selling postcards, so the photo must have been her own work.  She is a pretty good photographer, and since a lot of what she photographs is birds a house that keeps still for as long as you want it to must make a nice change.

I was ridiculously pleased with the postcard.  I can't quite work out quite why I liked it so much.  It is good to know that your friends have thought of you, even better to know that they remember something about what you are interested in, but that could be conveyed in a text.  Photo sharing is easy too, via a myriad of routes.  There's Instagram, though I haven't signed up to it and don't know exactly how it works, or the good old fashioned email attachment, or a link to a Dropbox file, or Facebook if you're on it, or just waving your mobile phone screen under somebody's nose the next time you see them.

Bothering to convert a photo to hard format and sending it by traditional mail seems quite wonderfully old fashioned.  Maybe that's its charm.  Vinyl albums are having a mini renaissance, and the growth in sales of e-books has stalled.  Retro is in the zeitgeist, and along with baking, home poultry keeping, and camping holidays in Cornwall, postcards are having a thing and somebody has bothered to create an app that lets you send your picture and message through the post as a glossy print.  In an age when we can all bring images up on multiple screens, instantly, the printed card has a strange authority. I put it on the pinboard in the hall, where it will still be long after yesterday's emails have disappeared way below the bottom of the screen in my inbox.

Addendum  After lunch I set both rabbit traps, baited with pieces of carrot.  One Amazon reviewer said that his rabbits had managed to take the carrot out of his traps without triggering the mechanism.  I told this to the Systems Administrator, who said I should be really worried if ours took the bottom out of the trap with an angle grinder.