|
WillyTrolove.com |
|
Wish you weren't here By Willy Trolove Sydney Morning Herald 4 February 2006
The saddest thing about the increasing popularity of email is the gradual demise of the postcard. Not so long ago you regularly received colourful postcards from friends, neighbours and loved ones who wanted to make you jealous about the fabulous time they were having overseas without you. These glimpses of the faraway world made their way through wars, famines and outbreaks of bird flu. They carried unusual stamps. They bore intriguing postmarks. Their lovingly handwritten greetings had been smudged by the fingers of several nations’ posties as they battled rain, sleet, hail and unsatisfactory camel transport to convey them to your door. Out they spilled, these bursts of holiday joy, from among the bills, the court summonses and the reminders about your impending root canal work. On the front was an impossibly perfect photo. This showed Manhattan at dawn, Paris at night, Stonehenge a little after morning tea. It featured Hawaiian hula girls in grass skirts, elderly Mexicans grinning despite the obvious failings of the Mexican dental system, and tribes of Mongolian nomads massing for the annual yak-milking festival. Every now and then you got a joke postcard. This showed a pair of buttocks lightly dusted with sand beneath the words “Beach Bum”, or an outdoor lavatory perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon with a sign on the door saying “No sudden motions”. On the back of each postcard a delightful caption explained the photograph. Perhaps it said “Beautiful Baghdad”, or “Opening day of the Newfoundland seal clubbing season”. Occasionally a map accompanied the caption. This showed you where in the world you could find the things shown on the postcard, if, for whatever reason, you couldn’t go on living without seeing them for yourself. Around the caption and the little map were cramped words, scrawled by your friend, your neighbour, or your spouse - who had fled with all your children in an international custody dispute. Typically, the writer’s excitement caused the words to line up at an increasingly erratic angle the further they went down the postcard. And the words were magical. Sometimes they were penned in a café in Havana while a secret policeman pretending to be a waiter slipped a listening device into the side salad. Sometimes they were scrawled in a Paraguayan hospital in the kind of hallucinogenic delirium that’s brought on by amoebic dysentery. Sometimes they were written in the African village where Dr Livingstone ate his first hyena. The brevity required by the tiny writing space lent an air of hurried glamour to the words (“Haven’t got room to tell you about the fire-juggling pygmies”), and made the faraway seem much more exciting than the near-at-hand (“Must go, Gerald wants to see the armadillos mating”). The little white lies that the writer penned made you even more jealous than the photo of the bronzed Brazilian beach goddess emerging from the surf. “Wish you here” the friend said when he didn’t. “Having a brilliant time” the party animal wrote when she wasn’t. “The food is fantastic”, the gourmet proclaimed when he had just regurgitated it into a nearby toilet. Best of all, the postcard arrived several weeks after the writer sent it. This allowed you to wander up to, say, Barry at a party and say wonderfully surreal things like “Gidday Barry, aren’t you’re meant to be in Swaziland?” But now, alas, the postcard is gone or is going. Now all we get are travel emails. These are as exotic as a bank statement and as magical as a gas bill. Gone is the brevity. Travel emails are long and tedious. They list every mind-numbing glamour-stripping detail of the writer’s holiday. Gone is the personal touch. Typically, the travel email is copied to every one of the 537 poor sods in the sender’s address book. Gone are the unusual stamps, the intriguing postcodes and the delayed arrival. Now there is no discernable difference between a travel email sent from Waziristan and one sent from Wagga Wagga. And gone are the impossibly perfect photos. Now all you get is an attached digital snapshot that is blurry and shows an unkempt traveller who you don’t recognise grinning at the camera in front of a famous landmark while a selection of food stains ambles down their “I luv Barbados” t-shirt. Well I’ve had enough. It’s time we put an end to the low-quality endlessly-rambling travel email. It’s time we returned to the good old days and demanded postcards from our travelling friends and family. Because I miss feeling jealous about someone else’s holiday. I miss the delightful captions. I miss the smudged writing. And I miss the little white lies. But most of all, I miss the hula girls in grass skirts... |
|
WillyTrolove.com
|
|
© Willy Trolove 2005 |
|
EMAIL Willy Trolove |
|
RECEIVE Willy’s columns by email If you enjoyed this piece, you can sign up to receive Willy’s regular columns in your inbox. Visit the homepage for more details |