The everlasting charm of sending a postcard from your travels

I try to send a postcard to my sister whenever I’m travelling. If I can find a funny one, at least. Yet these days, a postcard feels antiquated, a relic in an age of WhatsApp group chats and Instagram Stories zipping across the globe. It doesn’t feel as if there’s much point to one. But there’s something special about a postcard. About the way it’s delivered through postal service, the fact that when the person reaches into their post box, they find a little message from you, from the past. It’s a retro travel trend, and time travel of the most achievable kind.

There’s another kind of time travel that happens when we step back into the places that we’ve known and loved. Those old, familiar destinations. Something slots right back into place. Our favourite restaurants, our favourite streets, our favourite boutiques. The shopkeeper who remembers us from one year to the next. Familiar faces, seen at undefined intervals, blinking into existence for a week at a time, until they fade once more into the past. Until next time. Frozen, somehow, in time.

Some changes are more fluid, more measurable. My father once took me to see his childhood house in Nottingham, UK. His father was a baker; they lived above the shop. Forty-odd years later, we rounded the corner to discover a tanning salon. Time is not always kind. The past does not always hang around.

Yet there’s a coda to this tale. My parents went back to visit last year. The tanning salon had closed. In its place: a very successful Bulgarian bakery. A nicely proved, nicely risen, well-baked circle of life.

If a place feels frozen in time, it’s because you’re allowing yourself to step back into your own timeline, to explore that past version of you. The London of my 20s, the city I lived in, was a place of pubs and cocktails, hipster gigs and grungy nights. In many ways, it still is. Now, in my late 30s, I find myself revisiting those old haunts, wondering if I’ll bump into my younger self. But with two kids in tow, it’s not exactly the same.

Take one of the most famous opening lines in literature: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” I did. You probably did as well. These are shifts in personal geography that are worth postcards all of their own.

When you land at your next destination, find a postcard (hopefully a funny one) and send it to a friend or family member. It will arrive in the future, a missive from a past – and different – you.