Last year, I took part in a live radio discussion about the social etiquette required to leave a WhatsApp conversation. In the context of such things, the very idea of writing a postcard seems like a quaint anachronism. Even when they were in fashion, I hated writing them. My writing would be as big as I could possibly make it, and I am sure my postcards were every bit as boring to read as they were to write.
So why, at the age of 53, did I start writing them again? The reason was that I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly living abroad. Geographically, I was in exactly the same spot as I had been before. In every other way, though, I had been plucked from familiar territory and dropped unceremoniously in a foreign land. In November 2017, at the end of an eight-year-long battle with cancer, fought all along with customary pluck and dignity, my wife and best friend died. Fiona and I had been together for over 30 years, weathering the storms of ministry and sharing the journey of faith. Without her by my side, the familiar became strange, the reassuring became disturbing, and I was stranded.
The parallels with living in a foreign country to which I had not intended to move soon became apparent. I would visit the supermarket and buy too much of the right thing or the wrong thing altogether. I would find that other people were working off a different calendar to me, because my milestones and significant dates were not theirs. In social encounters I would feel unsure of myself and uncertain how the game was played. Occasionally I would catch sight of a single man in the mirror – something which I had not been for well over 30 years.
