Postcard pressure

Thought I'd share my latest video for Stamp & Coin Mart magazine.

I hope you appreciate the nifty editing. Three hours wading through iMovie's "Help" section proved time well spent in the end.

Found at a postcard fair in Preston, I first featured this card in a blog post back in June 2010.

Now, there are a couple more videos already in the can, but if there's a card on Postcardese you think I should include in a video do let me know.

Rest assured, Matt said the card did make it to the magazine's offices.

Take One

I said I'd let you know how Sunday's message reading went at my poet friend Valerie Jack's.

Well, it was a lot of fun. The stage was the roof of Val's houseboat! (No really, it was.) The sun did its bit. And everyone got merry on Pimm's, good chat and some cracking verse.

For my contribution I used 12 cards, reading each message twice - once as the sender and once as the recipient. So for 'Come home at once', I tried to give the sender a sense of urgency, and the recipient an air of confusion.

I suspect this was a touch ambitious given my acting skills, but it seemed to get across the ambiguity inherent in communicating through postcards.

Lots of new ideas after the performance. A teacher wanted to use some of the messages to help give a creative writing class. Another woman, thought it would make a good show for the Edinburgh fringe ("with a bit of practice" - duly noted!)

Postcard poetry

W.H. Auden said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. For our Edwardian postcarders, poems weren't abandoned... they were sent.

I've put a couple of cards up recently containing poetry. Like the card to Miss Cameron in the lead up to the 1906 general election. And then there was last week's card which formed something of a haiku:

Noon. Please. Will meet you.

Love as ever, A. E. S..

Miss Case, New Parade.

While it may not be of Auden quality, this week's message to Robert is a cracking ditty - sensible advice for "when you court a love that's new".

1906: The Postcard Election

Much has been made of this year's election in the UK being driven by new media - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook...

But it's not the first to have been influenced by new forms of communication. In fact, parties at every election in modern times have grappled with new ways of getting their messages across - whether it was the first political broadcasts on TV in the 1950s or the rise of rolling news in the 90s.

In the year leading up to the February 1906 election in which Campbell Bannerman's Liberal Party won big, postcards were a key battleground.

An astounding 677 million postcards were sent in 1905. And politicians were keen to get in on this. Today's card shows an example of how.

Campbell-Bannerman had just taken over as PM from the "Balfourian gang" and was set to call an election, much to the delight of our anonymous author ("Hail, hail, Oh hail! Our glorious Banner-man.)

What hit me first about this card was that someone had taken the time to write a poem for a friend on the qualities of a political leader. I simply can't imagine anyone today writing a ditty about Glorious Gordon, Super Cam or the Mighty Clegg.

But there's also the quality of the communication.

New social media - for all their wonder - put a great emphasis on one-to-many communication. And with that, the impact of each message falls. Status updates, tweets and round robin emails are easy to ignore.

A one-to-one message like this though had to be taken seriously. Of course, it would be a while before Miss J H Cameron's opinion counted at the ballot box. But that's another story...