When did you last send a postcard? For me, it was a couple of months back in Italy. I wrote it in the sleepy fishing village of Riomaggiore, at sunset. It’s likely I rambled a little – I scribbled the message to my parents while drinking a couple of beers… quite fitting really, seeing as the front of the card had a recipe for limoncello on it.

Now, I hadn’t thought about that card for months. That was, until the other day when my parents brandished a bottle of homemade limoncello. Yes, based on that very same recipe. Then coincidently, the next day I stumbled across a blog by Charles Simic bemoaning the lost art of postcard-writing.

What’s this, I thought. Lost? Hardly. Sure, it isn’t as popular as it once was, but the way Simic writes in the New York Review of Books you’d think postcard writers were endangered and rapidly headed towards extinction. They are, says Simic, ‘the last of a species’ who are being surpassed by fast-fingered emailers. He didn’t, surprisingly, mention the world of Facebook where people can update their status at the drop of a hat, rather than send a little missive home… But that might have been because Simic’s ode to the lost world of postcards also focussed on age. He wrote that postcard senders are ‘almost certainly middle aged or elderly’ and ‘sitting alone over a postcard and visibly struggling with what to write’. Erm. Eyebrows raised? Mine were. I’m no baby boomer but I’ll always pen a postcard home. Neither is the friend whose postcard from Florence is tacked to my bedroom wall. And, besides, who doesn’t get writers’ block from time to time?

That’s not to say I’ve been inundated with postcards from across the globe this summer. Like Simic, it has been rather dry on that front. And it is always lovely to get a colourful piece of cardboard with a quirky message on the back in the mail. I’d like to think, though, that’s got more to do with people’s economic circumstances than a lost art form. Because the next time I’m off I’m not only going to post one home to family, I’m going to take some inspiration from Annabel Vita who writes a Top Ten Things about a trip on a postcard to herself. What a great memento.

What about you? Are you a postcard writer, receiver or hater?