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A shock Yuletide customer has introduced us a beautiful Christmas current

Last week Bunny and I obtained a shock go to from a bearer of items who, in our minds, had lengthy change into a fable. No, it wasn’t Santa Claus. It was somebody much more legendary: a postman.

We couldn’t bear in mind the final time we’d been visited by, and even seen, an actual postman, a species distinct from the ever present couriers.

Along with gramophones, black-and-white TVs, and different relics, postmen have disappeared from our lives as if they’d by no means existed, having been vanished by a wave of the magical wand of digital know-how, of laptops, and emails, and smartphones.

The postman introduced us a Christmas card from mates in London, Roopa and Dan. Like postmen, greetings playing cards, Christmas or some other, have been dematerialised, banished by the identical digitised wizardry as postmen, being changed by computer-generated graphics and emojis.

When Bunny and I lived in Calcutta, each Yuletide season we’d hold up the Christmas and New Year playing cards we’d get from distant mates and relations, who in flip would get the playing cards we’d ship out in an unbreakable custom.

We’d determine which charitable trigger card we’d get – CRY, or HelpAge, or the World Wildlife Fund – and draw up an inventory of all these we’d ship them to.

Then there have been the postage stamps to be bought, from the Park Street put up workplace. We knew the postal charges for the playing cards to be delivered throughout the nation, however the postage for those meant for international shores needed to be ascertained from the put up workplace.

The envelopes for the playing cards being despatched overseas would fastidiously need to be marked CARD ONLY and BY AIR MAIL, to which PAR AVION could be added if we needed to sound French, to obviate the opportunity of their being shipped off by sea to reach at their vacation spot in the midst of subsequent summer season.

The postman’s go to vividly introduced all this again to us. The card wasn’t the one factor the postman gave us. He additionally gave us the present of reminiscence of instances long gone. Maybe, in any case, he was Santa Claus in disguise.

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