What's in a postcard? ........ Chorlton in 1994

Now I came back across this postcard today and was immediately drawn into it, not least because as postcards go it is a very late one.

Look closely and much of the detail looks very contemporary.  And so it should because it dates from 1994.

Of course there have been some changes, Cafe on the Green in the top right hand panel has undergone many changes of name and owners while Richard and Muriel’s next door is now an estate agent nor has the Pot Shop on Wilbraham Road once home to a collective of potters survived.

All of which makes it the most recent postcard in the collection and quite a novelty given that the practice of sending this type of card had all but stopped by the 1990s.

As my friend Lawrence once remarked such cards are just not stocked in local shops anymore, added to which when you do find them the cost of sending them is prohibitive and there is no chance they will arrive on the same day.

And a hundred years ago people regularly sent such postcards so confident that they would arrive within hours of being posted that they were often used to arrange a meeting later in the day.

But this is not in fact a post card; it is an election communication reminding people that “If you want a poster for your window, a car lift to the polling station, or wish to join” contact the election agent.  I should have recognised it as I took the photographs and in those long far off days will have delivered some of them in the run up to the May 5th election.

I had all but forgotten it but it served to remind me that often we see what we want to see.  I assumed I was looking at a postcard and took this one at face value until I turned it over and instead had to smile at the ingenuity of choosing to combine such an old fashioned style with a pretty neat take on electioneering.

And the embarrassing postscript, I had posted it as 1988, and it was Lawrence who corrected me.

Some days even when you lived through it you get it wrong.

Perhaps to lift that 1960s throwaway comment "If you remember the 1990s you weren't there". Or dreaming of the 60s.

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson from the original produced by Lawrence Beedle, 1994 and donated by Steve Henderson whose house I might have delivered it to.