It’s that time of year again. The schools are out, the out-of-office messages are on and everyone’s jetting off to sunnier climes to enjoy their fortnight of sand, sea and sangria.
And if there’s one thing we ALL love about going on holiday, it’s rubbing our friends’ and family’s noses in just how amazing our vacation is in comparison to their week of work at the corporate grindstone. Second only to forcing your nearest and dearest to painfully trawl through your Instagram posts, is the sending of the obligatory postcard back home.
Even in the digital age, we still get a strange sense of pleasure in sending a badly colourised photo of a long-dead seaside donkey to our relations. And with apps like TouchNote allowing us to send printed postcard versions of the holiday snaps on our smartphones, there’s little sign that the allure of the postcard is on the wane.
So, how do you write that perfect postcard home? Here’s the dos and don’ts for making your holiday postcard as palatable as possible, without rubbing too much salt (sun cream) into the wound.
Do:
- Make sure you get the address correct. You might still be operating from a dog-eared address book you started in 1991, or you may be very high tech and have your addresses saved to your Google contacts. But either way, get the house number and post code right, or your friend/relative’s neighbours will get to find out all about your regrettable attack of explosive diarrhoea in the local taverna.
- Pick a card with a lovely photo of your destination. To achieve maximum smugness points, you want your hotel and/or beach to look as awesome as possible. So choose a postcard that has the blue skies, golden beaches and beautiful vistas that will induce intense sensations of FOMO in whoever receives it.
- Be succinct about the holiday. No-one wants War & Peace written out on the back of their postcard, so keep it short and to the point. Tell them about Grandma’s inadvertent dive into the rock pool, explain why Auntie Sarah is coming back with an ‘interesting’ sunburn mark and feel free to inform your recipient just why Mum has decided to set up a taverna with the moustachioed Georgios – short bullet points will suffice; you can bore them rigid with the full details once you get back to Blighty with your stuffed donkey and extra holiday pounds.
- Finish with a nice, ‘look forward to seeing you’, or ‘catch up soon’ – but do not use ‘wish you were here’. If you did, you’d’ve invited them, and you didn’t, therefore you don’t want to spend your holiday with them and that’s just rubbing salt in the jellyfish wound.
Don’t:
- Choose a highly inappropriate photo. Much as you may find it hilarious to send an image of a ripped Spanish man in speedos to your Great Auntie Enid, remember that it’s best not to offend your recipient, or give the Post Office workers any cause for a raised eyebrow (or more) when delivering your card.
- Go right up to the margins with your writing. There’s limited space on the back of a postcard, which means you’ve only got a certain amount of capacity to fit in all your hastily scrawled writing. Limit yourself to a few paragraphs and some short bullets to get your point across, and don’t use tiny illegible handwriting that only a criminologist with a microscope will be able to read.
- Write in the margins, around the margins, or by the postage stamp. No trying to be clever getting the recipient to turn the postcard clockwise to try and read anything, they won’t or they’ll end up with a crick in their neck – either way, they’re not going to be happy.
- Leave instructions for your house sitter or other friends back home, you should have thought about that before you left. A postcard that the whole village may see is not the place to tell your sister where to find the back door key.
- Try writing poetry, on any account. You may be half cut on sangria or ouzo, but there’s really no excuse for inflicting your badly-scanning rhymes on anyone other than yourself (and Georgios of course).
How Not To Writte 