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This Twitter Account Will Give You Holiday Nostalgia

Natalie Gil
22 September 2016, 6:27
Photo: Via @pastpostcard.
Our own holidays may be over, but that doesn't mean we can't take pleasure from poking our noses into other people's. And when these holidays happened decades ago, it can be even more enjoyable. Twitter account Postcard From The Past (@PastPostcard) gives us a glimpse into how British people spent their precious time off in years gone by. Images from a heart-warmingly retro selection of postcards feature alongside short snippets of the writers' messages – often culminating in some quite random results.
The account has gained more than 24,000 followers in less than six months and a book based on it will be published next year, The Guardian reported. The idea was the brainchild of Tom Jackson, who runs a company that makes TV commercials, and who amassed a collection of thousands of postcards as a chid. He then came up with the idea of posting them alongside a short fragment of text. “I began to realise that with a bit of careful selection, these very ordinary cards could have quite weird, wonderful and entertaining messages on them," Jackson told The Guardian. "They are little snapshots of people’s lives – what concerns someone enough to write it down at a cafe table and send it off? Also, I think it’s quite nostalgic – postcards have fallen out of people’s holiday routine to a large extent.” Jackson has thousands of postcards, including some from as far back as Edwardian times, but it's those from more recent decades – the '60s, '70s and '80s, when mass tourism really took off – that interest him most.
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The cards betray how a British obsession with the weather runs deep, as well as how our eating habits have changed. "People often talk about how they’re eating well because the cards come from the time when people didn’t eat out very much, except on holiday,” Jackson said.
Another British trait exposed by the holiday snapshots is our ability to remain chipper – to "keep calm and carry on", as they say – during lousy circumstances, from dreary weather to bad traffic and even bomb scares.
"There’s a lesson to learn about the British character there,” mused Jackson.
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