I was trying to enter a classic car competition the other day. One of those "Win This Beautifully Restored Jaguar E-Type" things that appear between adverts for erectile dysfunction tablets and miracle lawn feed.
Now, being me, I naturally ignored the £12.50 online entry route and went looking for the free postal entry option buried somewhere in the terms and conditions, because there always is one. Usually hidden in six-point font between "employees may not enter" and "the judges' decision is final". Sure enough, there it was.
"Free entries accepted by postcard only."
Excellent, I thought. Outsmarted the system again. The old ways endure.
Except they don't, because apparently Britain no longer has postcards. Not scenic postcards. I wasn't after a picture of Blackpool Tower at sunset or a startled donkey on Weston-super-Mare beach. I just wanted an actual plain postcard. A rectangle of card. Roughly A6. The sort of thing Victorian people managed to acquire while simultaneously building railways across India.
I tried the Post Office first, naturally enough. No postcards. Which feels a bit like discovering Halfords no longer sells car parts but has an excellent range of scented candles and mortgage advice.
Then Ryman. No postcards there either, despite apparently selling them online, suggesting they now occupy the same mythical retail category as affordable housing and competent government IT systems.
Then The Works. Now, The Works can supply you with an astonishing range of items nobody has ever consciously decided to buy. Want a felt owl? No problem. A motivational sign saying "Gin O'Clock" in distressed lettering? Entire aisle devoted to it. A cardboard 3D Chinese temple requiring 14 hours of assembly and the patience of a neurosurgeon? Absolutely. Several, in fact.
But postcards?
No.
At this point the entire thing became strangely fascinating. I found myself driving around South Gloucestershire asking increasingly confused teenagers whether they stocked "blank postcard stock". You can actually see the panic in their eyes. They've been trained for vape juice, printer cartridges and parcel returns. Suddenly some ageing bloke in a fleece is demanding Edwardian communications technology.
One assistant suggested I "print something from Canva". Another pointed me towards birthday cards. A third looked at me with the cautious expression normally reserved for men who collect carrier bags full of damp clocks. Eventually I discovered that what I actually needed to ask for was "300gsm A6 card stock", because postcards apparently no longer exist as a recognised concept within British retail.
And somewhere around this point I started to suspect the competition companies knew this perfectly well. The free postal entry exists because legally it has to, but they've quietly chosen the one object modern Britain can no longer actually supply. You can still buy artisanal Korean face serum at midnight from a petrol station, but try obtaining a plain postcard and suddenly you're recreating the supply chain problems of the Napoleonic Wars.
And that's oddly revealing, because postcards used to matter. People sent them from holiday because international phone calls cost roughly the GDP of Belgium and because nobody wanted to hear your entire holiday in real time anyway. You got one small rectangle.
"Weather lovely. Hotel terrible. Dad sunburnt. Back Tuesday."
That was enough.
Now people bombard each other with 400 photographs of tapas before they've even finished chewing it, and somehow we know less about each other than we did in 1978. There was also something gloriously democratic about postcards. No apps. No subscriptions. No passwords. No verification emails. No QR codes leading to another QR code. Just card. Write on it. Stick stamp on. Done.
The competition companies know most people under 40 would rather rebuild a carburettor blindfolded than locate an actual postcard. Frankly, by the time I'd finished searching for one, I felt I'd earned the bloody Jaguar anyway.
Though knowing my luck, if I do eventually find a postcard, Royal Mail will probably classify it as a small parcel.
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