Postcards from around the world

[shewhomust]

Synchronicity being as it is, two of my friends have, over the past couple of months, been sorting out their postcard collections.

The fabulous Gail-Nina Anderson has been ransacking her collection to collate an exhibition currently on show at the Lit & Phil: a series of panels are assembled around themes, some of them conventionally rational (postcards from the First World War, views of the North East Coast Exhibition of 1929), some of them bringing together unexpected juxtapositions (food, waxworks, pictures "enhanced" by floral borders) some of them - the frames labeled "Curator's Choice" - completely off the wall. From a picture of a two-headed calf to a kitten doing the ironing, there are postcards for every taste and none. Plus, as you leave, a box of cards from which you are invited, entreated to help yourself to a souvenir.

This in itself would have made me long to start shuffling my own postcards - which are not so much a collection as an accummulation, the sort that builds up over the decades if you never throw a card away - into themed sets: interiors, things made of wood, puffins (well, obviously).

But meanwhile, on the other side of the globe and without even the excuse that it's summer, our very own gillpolack has been sorting out her life, tidying up her room and thinning out her postcards, and has very generously shared the surplus with her friends. So now I have lots of lovely new cards to add into the mix.

Each time I shuffle the pack, I have a different favourite: it might be an igloo in Alaska, which light shining out from within, or Christo's wrapped Reichstag, a serene Buddha surveying the mists of central Java or ice on a snowgum tree in the Australia Alps (Australia has Alps? See how educational this is!). But today's choice is this scene from Bali:

The scene is charming, but the text on the back is irresistible: When raining season comes, they have the Ramayana Ballet staged at the village hall. In Village Hall if wet...

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

So in village hall throughout the rainy season...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Remember that here in the UK we are unaccustomed to predictable weather...

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

This is another reason to move to the UK: excitement!

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

But does the vicar's wife do the teas? :o)

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I guess one needs a lot of grutness ("the resolve with which the Queen sits through five days of polynesian folk dancing" according to The Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams&John Lloyd) to enjoy that wet day in Hall. You may also need to revive and perhaps even enjoy this community: http://uglypostcards.livejournal.com/

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

As it happens, I have been to Grutness (it's where the ferry from Fair Isle comes in to Shetland Mainland - you need a degree of grutness for that voyage, too!)...

Thank you for the link - I have passed it on to Gail.