Messages from Alghero

It is by way of a postscript and a reflection on a holiday now gone.

When I first started visiting Greece, all that was available as a way of communicating with home was the postcard.  It never occurred to me that you should search out a phone box and call Manchester.

Now the postcard has a long and proud history and for historians the cards sent not just from the sea side but from towns, villages to family elsewhere are a wonderful historical record.

I have plundered the collections for pictures of old Chorlton and from time to time have wandered across the personal comments written on the back.  Most of course are mundane, but sometimes the drama of the period they were written comes through, like the one expressing concern that his employees were planning to go on strike.

This was the age of frequent collections and deliveries, so a card sent in the morning would arrive by lunch time, enabling the sender to arrange to meet or warn the family they would be home for tea.

Sending a card from the Greek Islands was of course always something you did knowing that in all probability you would be home before the message.  Still choosing, writing and sending postcards is part of the holiday.

Or was as my friend Lawrence ruefully pointed out once, who now sends postcards?  Now Simone and Rosa still do but for most of us technology has pretty much advanced.

It began with the telephone card, making it easier to speak to the UK.  You bought it in advance knew how much time it gave you and used it accordingly.  Of course you still had to find a telephone box which was empty and hope the lines were not too busy.  Neither of which was always easy on the islands.

Then of course along came the mobile phone, expensive I grant you to phone home, but handy and again providing you kept it quick a useful way of keeping in touch.

Last year it was the computer, linked to wi fi, and the year before the internet café.  And now on a resort in an apartment where we do not have wi fi I can talk to the world via a link I push into the computer and it connects me via a mobile in an instant.  We brought out our own knowing it would be expensive, but switched to Vodafone Italia, and so there you have it, in the space of a few short decades, I have gone from pen and post card to instant communication.

On the other hand I now sit on the balcony instead of the beach, typing away instead of getting sand on the card and getting the tan I came for.

Ah well you can’t win’em all.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson