Postcards on the edge. (Or is my dad just being lazy?)

I love getting postcards, although I rarely do these days.  There is something eerily-Victorian about a piece of cardboard plopping on your doormat or being flung into your in-tray (as opposed to inbox) with a photo (or perhaps several) on the front showing where someone else has been recently.

I must confess I only really send them to one person - so how can I expect to receive many, I hear you cry - and that's a fair rebuke.  But my former secretary in Singapore gets one from each new place I venture to - where there is a half-decent postal service.  I assumed that Rwanda fell into this category, but was a bit surprised when the card from my amazing trek with the mountain gorillas took 3 months to arrive.

Even if I don't get postcards through the post, I do still buy them for myself and blu-tack them to my office wall - they're such obvious and immediate reminders of wondrous places I've seen.  

This isn't going to turn into a lament of another analogue-world remnant dying out - without the digital world, I wouldn't be blogging to you all today - but I can't help feeling the memories captured by a view of the promenade, a hazy mountain, a cityscape by night (not the all-black joke postcards you sometimes see) with skyscrapers all lit up beaming back at you, or a tableau of nature in some form or another (mating scenes perhaps excepted) can't be conveyed the same way with an iPhone click and a paste on Facebook.

This all said, the thing that has propelled me to write on this occasion, is the fact that while I haven't received postcards from my parents for a number of years now, something rather momentous happened during their recent trip to France.

Each town or hostelry where my dad could get his hands on a computer and internet access, he duly reported back to me with a snippet of their jaunt around the Gallic countryside.  Thought I'd relay the exchange [with annotations, comments, explanations in square brackets]:

11th July

Title: No title
Dad:  Enjoying France - people nice.  Got your mother eating calamari - told her it was onion rings.

13th July

Title: France
Dad:  Arrived in  Lyon nothing but the best **** Hotel La Roosavelt
After a 5 *Wigan performance 16 / 37

-- 
regards Stan

[They'd been to Perpignan prior to Lyon - that's where my mother had been tricked into culinary tricky waters.  Wigan in this context is the rugby league team - no idea whom they were playing against in this five star match; Dad obviously didn't think the opposition were worth mentioning.]

14th July

Title: France
Dad: Lyon Arrived Sunday every thing closed Monday National Day same but we enjoyed the rest
Love Dad 
Me: Ah yes.  Bastille day.  Revolutionaries !  Still we killed a king way before thy did !!  Love to mam.  She enjoying it?
Dad: No National Day Bastille Day 6 May, no?
Me: Nope.  24 July is Bastille day.  8 may is victory in Europe day - end of WWII .
Dad: What ever. We enjoyed Albert 1WW lot of horrible history but we had a nice time.  We are now in Mons for 2 nights,sale home Sunday stay in Ashford the night up NORTH Monday.  We have had a lovely time great food Good Hotels, I will collapse when the C/C comes.
Love Mam  Dad .

[You notice, my mother gets added to Dad's signature at this point - although he didn't actually answer my enquiry about where my mother was enjoying herself.  The "NORTH" is a reference to the north of England and "C/C" is credit card - just rather glad he wasn't using mine on this occasion.]

[I then send a mail back saying how email is better than postcards - which I didn't really mean - and ask him if he minded if I use his mail trail for my blog.  "NO" came the rather curt reply.  I'm assuming he meant "No, I don't mind." since I'm using it anyway...]

[And then came the most illuminating of all the exchanges.]

19th July

Title: France [Methinks he couldn't quite muster up different titles, and why bother, they were in France I suppose...]
Dad: On our last day in Mons,sitting in the main square watching wedding party's going into the Reg office.  There are some sights!  One was in all white long wedding dress quite nice lifted her dress to walk and she had dirty ... plimsolls on.  Tickled your Mam.  It is rather hot going for a drink, 33c.  Love You
Mam  Dad

[Almost Hemmingway this last one, isn't it.  And not short on embellishment either, for when I spoke with my mother after they reached back home, she claimed not to have even noticed the bride's shabby footwear.  LOL.  Perhaps dad was making his own judgements and perhaps he'd already had one too many cooling beers.]

It was refreshing and comforting to be in contact with my parents as they zipped through a foreign land and while not a substitute for a postcard, it made me smile.  I could hope for a sprinkling of super snaps of their jaunt across the "hexagon" to compensate for the lack of picture on my postcard, too.  

But alas my father tends to be random to say the least in his photography subjects and all I can realistically look forward to is an abandoned crane on the banks of the Rhône, a graffiti-ridden bridge over an autoroute between Dijon & Mons or an out-of-focus shot of my mam (we don't say mum "up north") sipping a frothy cappuccino grimacing back dad for taking the pic in the first place.  That said, if I get any I'll share them and may stick one or two  on my office wall.