Willy Trolove: Wish you were sending me a picture perfect postcard

One of the sad things about the increasing popularity of email is the demise of the postcard. Not so long ago you regularly received colourful postcards from friends, neighbours and loved ones who wanted to make you jealous about the fabulous time they were having overseas without you.

These glimpses of the faraway world made their way through wars, famines and outbreaks of Asian chicken flu. They carried unusual stamps. They bore intriguing postmarks.

Their lovingly handwritten greetings had been smudged by the fingers of several nations' posties who had battled rain, sleet, hail and unsatisfactory camel transport to convey them to your door.

Out they spilled, these bursts of holiday joy, from among the bills, the court summonses and the reminders about your impending root-canal work.

On the front was an impossibly perfect photo. This showed Manhattan at dawn, Paris at night, Stonehenge a little after morning tea.

It featured Hawaiian hula girls in grass skirts, elderly Mexicans grinning despite the obvious failings of the Mexican dental system, and tribes of Mongolian nomads massing for the annual yak-milking festival.

Every now and then you got a joke postcard. This showed a pair of buttocks lightly dusted with sand beneath the words "Beach Bum", or a dunny perched in a precarious location above the Grand Canyon with a sign on the door saying "No sudden movements".

On the back of each postcard a delightful caption explained the photograph. Perhaps it said "Lost luggage area, Terminal 2, Heathrow", or "Opening day of the Newfoundland seal clubbing season".

Occasionally a little map accompanied the caption. This showed you where in the world you could find the things shown on the postcard, if, for whatever reason, you couldn't go on living without seeing them for yourself.

Around the caption and the little map were cramped words, scrawled by your friend, neighbour or spouse, who had fled with all your children in an international custody dispute.

Typically, the writer's excitement caused the words to line up at an increasingly erratic angle the further they went down the postcard. The words were magical. Sometimes they were penned in a cafe in Havana while the secret policeman pretending to be the waiter slipped a listening device into the walnut salad.

Sometimes they were scribbled in a Paraguayan hospital in the kind of hallucinogenic delirium that only amoebic dysentery brings on. Sometimes they were written in the African village where Dr Livingstone ate his first hyena.

The brevity required by the tiny writing space lent an air of hurried glamour to the words ("Haven't got room to tell you about the fire-juggling pygmies"), and made the faraway seem much more exciting than the near-at-hand ("Must go, Gerald wants to see the armadillos mating").

The little white lies that the writer penned made you even more jealous than the photo of the bronzed Brazilian beach gods emerging from the surf. "Wish you here," the friend said when she didn't. "Having a brilliant time," the party animal wrote when he wasn't. "The food is fantastic," the gourmet proclaimed when he had just regurgitated it into a nearby toilet. "The weather is awesome," the sun seekers declared when several members of their tour party had already been swept away in rising floodwaters.

Best of all, the postcard arrived several weeks after the writer sent it. This allowed you to wander up to, say, Barry, at a party and say wonderfully surreal things like, "Hello Barry, you're meant to be in Swaziland".

But now, alas, the postcard is gone or going. Now all we get are travel emails. These are as exotic as a bank statement, as magical as a gas bill.

Gone is the brevity. Travel emails are long and tedious. They list every mind-numbing glamour-stripping detail of the holiday.

Gone is the personal touch. The email is usually copied to the 537 other poor sods in the sender's address book.

Gone are the unusual stamps, the intriguing postcodes and the delayed arrival. Now there is no discernible difference between a travel email sent from Palestine and one sent from Panmure.

And gone are the impossibly perfect photos. Now all we get is an attached digital snapshot that takes 17 hours to download.

This shows an unkempt and jet-lagged traveller forcibly grinning at the camera with some famous landmark sticking out of their head while a trail of food stains ambles down their T-shirt.

Well, I've had enough. It's time we put an end to the low-quality, endlessly rambling travel email. It's time we returned to the good old days and demanded postcards from our travelling friends and family.

Because I miss feeling jealous about someone else's holiday. I miss the delightful captions, the smudged writing and the little white lies. But most of all, I miss the hula girls in grass skirts.