Jim Eagles: Postcards from the edge

If I'd paid a visit to Helen Perkins' home at Papakura I wouldn't have needed to ask, as I did in an earlier column, if postcards were still popular with travellers.

Perkins has so many of them she's had a three-panel screen made, with rows and rows of postcards on display in plastic sheets.

There are already nine drops, each with hundreds of postcards, "and every time I get more I have another drop made".

This interest in postcards began when Perkins travelled the world with her late husband, Buzz, well-known in the Auckland of yesteryear as a breakfast show host and motor racing promoter. "We went to all sorts of unusual places, which were wonderful to send postcards from,"she recalls. "They looked so beautiful and had such wonderful stamps that I kept them."

Originally they were kept in chocolate boxes - "piles of them" - but as the stack kept mounting Perkins decided "either I had to do something with them or throw them out".

So she had her first screen made "and it's kept growing from there".

Needless to say the screens are a great talking point. "My grandchildren like looking at them ... and so do I because they all mean something to me. And there are a lot of people who know I collect postcards so they send them to me and then next time they visit they like to see if they can spot their cards."

That may be a spectacular way of displaying postcards, but sending them and collecting them is obviously far from unusual judging from reader reaction to the topic.

In fact half a dozen people even sent me postcards to make the point.

Val Jones from Te Awamutu says she loves sending and receiving postcards. "I use the free ones, buy traditional postcards and make my own with whatever comes to hand." To demonstrate, she sent a cheerful postcard of a New Zealand Christmas scene which looks as though it was cut from a chocolate box.

As a mail sorter, Jones says she sees postcards from all over the world. "They are usually colourful, cheerful [and] packed with small writing and interesting stamps.

"It's nice to know that the sender has taken the time (and money) to share a part of their holiday with you."

Shaun Cooney from Woodhill is another economy-minded postcard enthusiast. His postcard looked suspiciously like a freebie from West Brook vineyards.

But he also offered a useful tip. When visiting foreign countries, the first thing he does is to find the cost of sending a postcard, "then I purchase 50 stamps and uplift airmail stickers so there's no need to queue again".

Marlene Blood comes from Whangarei and sent a very nice postcard of the Whangarei Town Centre to show her enthusiasm. "I have a list of 10 or more friends and family who get at least two each time we are on holiday. I fill each card up with so much I wonder if they can be read but everyone tells me they love them."

Joan Harbour from Birkenhead sent a postcard from the British Postal Museum in London - the Mecca for postcard enthusiasts - and printed on it the slogan, "Long live postcard communications".

"I love receiving postcards and want them packed with news," she says, "so therefore I must reciprocate when I make my travels."

Harbour reckons the most exciting postcards she has sent were posted from St Kilda, the westernmost island in the Outer Hebrides, where the postmark features a puffin.

Rod Lyons, of Auckland, has been collecting postcards for 35 years - and swapping postcards of trains with one friend for more than 15 years - and continues to do so. On a recent trip to South America and the Antarctic, for instance, he sent more than 100. "All arrived within two weeks, except for the Antarctic ones, which were not collected from Port Lockhart on the Antarctic Peninsula for another 10 days."

And in case you sneerily refer to postcards as old-fashioned, Lindsay Andrews, of Adam Design in East Tamaki, sent a new high-tech postcard his company is developing, which contains a tiny CD of New Zealand images. The pictures are beautiful but the file of the sample copy is so big it takes an age to run.

Then Ratesh Dhir, of British-based InAMobile, sent details of the even more high-tech electronic postcard service his company is already providing for Vodafone, O2 and Travelocity in Britain, and which may be available in New Zealand "in the not too distant future".

"Basically it allows camera phone users to take a picture, add a message and address, and send it as a physical postcard anywhere in the world."

In fact postcards are so popular that there's even a book about them: Wish you were here: the story of New Zealand postcards. But I'll write about that another time.