Picture this

I had dinner with my mother and John last night (John is looking much better after his pneumonia, which is good). I told Mum that I got a postcard the other day; one of my old school friends is on holiday in Alice Springs, where I was born (so my mother has been there too, obviously).

'Look, here's the card,' I said, waving it at her.

'I haven't got my glasses. What are the pictures on it?'

'Ah, well, top left is Mount Gillen.'

'Been there.'

'Bottom left is Alice Springs seen from Anzac Hill.'

'Been there.'

'The big picture at the right is John Flynn's grave.'

'Been there.'

'And... oh, no, I thought it was another caption, but it just says that the photos are by Derek Roff.'

'Oh, I know him! He was a park ranger when we lived there. Came from South Africa.'

'Oh.'

I don't know why that surprised me, really. Alice Springs is not a particularly big place, after all... but postcards are such mass-produced things, I never think of the people who actually make them. But they're real, apparently.

John reminded me of the old postcard he has; produced in the 70s, it shows a picture of a park, with a family admiring a fountain in the centre. The family is his brother and sister-in-law and their two sons. They were having a picnic in the park one day and a photographer came and asked them, since they were the only people there, would they mind posing to make the place look popular? Anyway, they posed, and got a box of postcards as payment for their trouble, which I remember being very impressed by when I found out.