Resuming normal service now that the Postal Strike is settled.

For the annual postcard night at the Burnley Philatelic Society, I thought I’d do a display to demonstrate how postcard publishers would take a design and update it by various means (new border, caption, addition of greeting or colour etc.) I‘d picked out two with the same picture - of a cat, apparently singing to music. The earlier card was in black and white and had a Christmas greeting overprint; the second was in colour with a birthday greeting and a carpet-like background added and then I noticed another change. In the older card, the title on the music was ‘Meet me by Moonlight Alone’ but, by the time the later card was produced, this song had evidently dropped out of the top twenty and the title replace by ‘Loves Old Sweet Song’ (although the actual musical notation was the same). I don’t know how either of these songs go but, no doubt, Westlife will do a cover version at some stage.

Selling cards via my website means I sometimes have to answer questions about cards depicted, such as the date on the postmark or whether it’s possible to read a shop’s name under a magnifying glass, but the other day I had one, about an animated beach scene, which really stopped me in my tracks. ‘Do you know the names of the people in the picture?’ Er…no.