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.

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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. My parents bought me a book about postcard collecting and I loved visiting a small shop set into a wall in Scarborough called ‘The Postcard Shop’, which sold cards from all over the world. I spent hours in there, adding to my collection.

Today, people send far fewer postcards. 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.

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 lovely, larger-than-average cards, posted with what I was led to believe were 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. If the traditional approach fails miserably, this seems like a good option. I’d have to be on holiday with my app-savvy teenagers, however, to accomplish this.

There is still a chance that my postcards could arrive, but it has been almost a month now, so it’s highly unlikely.