I have never been on holiday without sending a postcard.

In my youth, I would send a whole stack to family and friends, carefully choosing them according to my parents’ postcard-buying guidelines: never a card with more than one view, always an interesting scene that prompts the receiver to take more than just a glance.

Growing up, I used to love receiving postcards, and would look for hours at images of places like New York or Paris, scrutinising the street scene and imagining what it would be like to go there.

My uncle, who travelled widely with work, sent me loads of postcards, mostly from North America: I can still clearly remember the images of the Grand Canyon which I thought fantastic. We received a few postcards from my mum’s aunt in South Africa, of exotic flowers and beautiful coastlines. And my nan, who lived in Majorca, sent me a never-ending stream of postcards featuring Spanish dancers, with real material dresses sewn onto the card.

I amassed such a collection that I placed them in albums, which I have to this day. I was, although I didn’t know it at the time (and wouldn’t know it now were it not for Google), a young deltiologist . My parents bought me a book about postcard collecting and I loved visiting a small shop set into a wall in Scarborough, called, simply ‘ The Postcard Shop’, which sold cards from all over the world.

Today, people send far fewer postcards. Forty years ago, one in three British holidaymakers bought and penned one now, that number is just one in three. Of my friends, just two send postcards when on holiday. I keep them on my kitchen pin board for a year or two before transferring them to a shoe box.

York Press:

From Barcelona with love...

I still send them, but have suffered a huge blow to my postcard-sending confidence. Of the five postcards I sent to family and friends from a recent holiday in Spain, none have arrived. They were all larger-than average cards, posted with what I was led to believe was the appropriate stamps and posted in what I thought was a bonafide post box. I took time over them, and a couple contained messages from my daughters, so I am really disappointed. Maybe someone set the post box on fire, or maybe the postman didn’t like what I’d said about Barcelona.

A neighbour told me how she uses her mobile phone to order and send actual postcards featuring her own photos. I’m not one for modern technology, but if the traditional approach fails miserably, this seems like a good option. I’d have to be on holiday with my teenagers, however, to accomplish something like this.

There is still a chance that my postcards could arrive, but it has been three weeks now and their emergence is highly unlikely.