Blipping in 1978

I am with my mum on the south coast and it's a sign of progress that I felt up to going up into the attic today, although I'm now paying a bit of a price for the bending. It was worth it. I spotted some index-card boxes and realised immediately what they were: the home of my postcard collection. I haven't given them any thought in over 40 years.

They're mostly cards from places I visited, kept for myself as a memento. I remembered some of them clearly, others not at all. What was most interesting were the few cards that had been sent to the family, some over 50 yeard old. Most precious of all were cards that I'd actually written myself, all to my two younger brothers. They were from a time when I'd just left university and was exploring the mountains of England and Wales and Ireland, and also Switzerland. There's one from my first Alpine mountaineering trip. The boys were just nine and eleven years old then. You could say that it was an early form of blipping.

It was amazing to realise that my handwriting hasn't changed at all.