Smugness stamped all over them
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
Ever since my column a little while back on the sending of
postcards
for gloating purposes (rather than those that should be intended
to empathise with the miserable souls stuck back at the office), mischievous
readers from far and near have kindly been sharing their holidays with me.
Via postcard, of course.
This has shown me several things. One, gloating is a fair-dinkum
national pastime. Never let it be said that the Aussie love of
one-upmanship is going to the dogs. I base this on the sheer
number
of postcards to me which began: “I don't wish to gloat but ...”
One bloke impressed me no end by managing to work in the words
“safari suit”, “stupendous”, “prodigious” and “agoggle” into
one sentence - and still have room for the postage stamp and
address.
Another reader, lolling about in Bali, regaled me with her
stories
of sleeping in until noon and being treated to a “divine
masseuse
whose hands are a gift from heaven”. But she thoughtfully added,
“I
don't want to rub it in or anything.”
He he he. Perish the thought. But from all this, I have also
learnt there is, somewhere in this world, a person whose job it is to spend all
day long creating oddly goopy, freebie postcards. You know, the ones they leave
around to promote their spot in the hope visitors will send them to their
friends. Or, in this case, columnists.
Hotels are a great source. The official hotel postcard usually
features a picture of the building in all its concrete splendor. Sometimes it
also has a tiny inset picture of people at the reception desk holding phones up
to their ears while smiling at the camera with the frozen look of someone
trying to ignore the boss gesticulating wildly for them to look happy.
This picture is used because the person who designed this postcard knows your family and friends back home really want to know what the woman behind the desk at the hotel you just checked in at looks like when she is holding a phone to her ear.
There is another example of the goopy postcard that really
captures
the imagination: the tourist body cartoon postcard. One of my
favorite examples comes from readers Cliff and June. They went
to Vancouver, judging by the cheery postcard of their West Coast City and
Nature Sightseeing bus, which appears to be careening into the painted blue ocean
to dong that cartoon whale on the head - the one next to the
otter doing the backstroke.
I like this postcard, particularly, for the waving brown bear
and the yellow seaplane on a collision course with a mountain. (I do wonder if
Canada's tourism association really thought this one through.)
Anyway, Cliff and June, whom I did not know until they introduced
me
to waving brown bears, wrote: “We are exceptionally
smug, having yet to go to an Alaska sector, followed by the
Calgary
stampede.”
Thank you for sharing, Cliff and June. If this continues, and I
am
sure I speak on behalf of your forlorn, unCanadian-bound
colleagues,
that the office vote will be for your next holidays to be
rescinded.
But it was Michelle who really gave me a chuckle, with a lovely
postcard clearly written with the folks back home in mind. It
read:
“I am having a really lousy time here in Melbourne. All my
friends
are giving me s... Can't wait to get home.”
Hey, now that's a postcard. Thank you, Michelle.
And thank you, everyone else who wrote in - I just hope your
holidays were even half as magnificent as you all claimed they were.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser,
28 JUL 1998