I started writing the obligatory postcards, as one did before the days of texts/instagram/facebook etc, to ‘friends & family’ during my first visit to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in April 2012. It wasn’t until my third visit in late December 2013 that I started sending what I might have written on a postcard, electronically. Abbreviated to PCs, the titles of the first seven sounded like something from a travel digest of Brazil: Rio de Janeiro (3&4), Sāo Paulo & Caneneia (5), Petropolis (6), Carnival (in Rio) (7), Beach Life in Brazil (8&9), Paraty (10) and Sāo Conrado (11). Wasn’t I a lucky chap?

Along came my lovely techie son-in-law Sam and he set up my page on WordPress, www.postcardscribbles.co.uk. ……..

….. and he also found a post office franking for Brighton & Hove dated May 1940. (Note 1)

Seems a long time ago now and it is! Over eight years in fact. During the first UK Lockdown for the Covid pandemic, March 2020, I increased the frequency from two a month to one a week so this is my three hundredth, each about 1000 words. It’s not easy to group them into any sort of categories but I will try to, as it might make the back catalogue less daunting for my newer readers.

Places we’ve been to in Brazil

The series of postcard scribbles started in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Celina’s home city and that of her family. Brazil is enormous, some 4300 kms both north to south and east to west at its widest part. We have travelled north to Recife where my great grandfather Richard Sidney Corbett was born in 1850 (34) and south to Brazil’s Santa Catarina, one state away from the border with Uruguay (63). We visited the waterfalls at Foz that puts Niagara in the US to shame and gives Victoria Falls a good run for its money (51) and we spent some time in the world’s biggest flattest wetlands, some 800kms north to south and 500kms east to west, Pantanal (17 and 20).

Our Alaska journey in 2015

 In 2015 we followed in the footsteps of another of my great-grandfathers, George Nation, and his route up from Seattle into Alaska, to Dawson City and eventually Eagle, population 52, in 1900, 1901 and 1902. Postcards 44 & 45 covered this plus PC 46 included a few days in San Francisco.

One year we flew eastwards, visiting Australia, Auckland, and The Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand, before crossing the Pacific to Santiago in Chile (88 & 89).  We returned to South East Asia and The Antipodes in 2019, just before Covid locked down the globe! (168, 169 and 170)

There and back or straight through!!

In PC 37, I described visiting the Rocha Miranda family home in Friburgo, Brazil. Closer to home in Hove, in PC 58, I scribbled about returning to my late parents’ home in Balcombe, 20 miles north of Brighton. The search for family connections saw us fly to Limerick, to look for the home of Sarah Fosbery, a great-great-grandmother (127 from June 2018).

Sarah Fosbery

In 2019 we spent a couple of nights in the city of my birth, Bath (164 & 165).

Portugal has featured a great deal, ever since our first short break in April 2016, visiting Celina’s brother and family who were looking for somewhere to live (87). Subsequent postcards, 107, 112, 130, 245 for example, have covered Estoril and the Lisbon littoral. In 2018 we took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander on the north Spanish coast and drove west and then south into Portugal. Sicily featured in PC 134 entitled ‘The Largest Mediterranean Island’.

My love of offshore sailing is reflected in a number of reminisces; Sailing in The Baltic (106), racing across The Atlantic (116) and Kiel to Oslo (229).

Somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic 1976

Times when it’s been a little hairy are covered in Off Arromanches (209/211), Almost a Disaster (215) and Knockdown (249), supplemented by Ropes, Warps & Sheets (231).

The current focus on health and fitness has featured quite a lot in these three hundred postcards. Some have been specific like My Thumb (52), Molars & Wisdom (64 & 66), Sight & Eyes (94), Up My Nose (190, One’s Heart (280) and Hot Yoga Thoughts (84 & 93). More general ones have covered Bacteria & Bloating (28), Loo Paper (47) and The Loo (54), Male Waistlines (55) and Am I Obese? (233), The Common Cold (148) and Montefiore (my back operation) (99).

Some have had a very serious element, like What’s Going On (21) which looked at the ugly war against ISIS. That was eight years ago and now we have the Ukrainian War to be extremely concerned about: my PC 276 was about their cultural side of life – ‘Picture at an Exhibition’ with the overtones from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Napoleon’s retreat from the gates of Moscow. Collectively PCs 263, 269 and 278 raise the issues of refugees, of migrants, of freedom and of hope.  In February 2018 I wrote about ‘Ancient and Modern Slavery’ in PC 117.

I looked at ‘Alcohol and Other Drugs’ in PC 15 in 2014, and followed it with ‘Alcohol and The British Issue’ in PC 257 seven years later. Earlier this month I scribbled ‘Judge Not’ (298) about the “the most socially acceptable drug”. The issue of what people do with their cigarette butts is the subject of PC 234 ‘No Buts ….. No Butts’. Surrounded by the ‘Carwash’ corruption investigation in Brazil at the time, I looked at the UK’s record of being squeaky clean, or not, in Money & Corruption PC 36. Two incidents, the Grenfell Tower fire when 72 people died and the Post Office scandal when over 700 were wrongly convicted, were the focus of ‘Generosity in Government’, PC 235 of June 2021.

And finally there are over two hundred and thirty others, covering topics as diverse as our language, English and others, the written word and spelling, Christmas, Boxing Day and Easter, manners and etiquette, guns in America, health, safety and customer services, chickens, pigs, cars and driving, pockets, the Truth, bread and toast, modern complexity and so on and so forth.

The late Queen’s coffin moved from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall on 14th September 2022

The penultimate one of these 300 postcards was written the day after Queen Elizabeth II died. It feels today as though a page has been turned, a chapter finished, the book closed. Satisfaction! Next week, after her funeral on Monday, the start of a new book, a new chapter and the first of another hundred postcards!

Richard 16^th September 2022

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 Interesting stamp and frank. Celebrating 100 years 1840-1940 with portraits of Victoria and George VI, a postcard (maybe!) posted in Brighton & Hove on 6^th May 1940 at 5:30. We were at war with Nazi Germany and within twenty days started the evacuation of the BEF from the beaches of Dunkirk.