Christmas cards were means of telling whether their friends were still alive - Vladimir McTavish

It is nice to hear from friends and loved ones over the festive season, but if you have unlimited texts on your mobile tariff, and you can send as many pictures and videos as you like on WhatsApp, why go to the bother and expense of sending a card?

The cards themselves are cheap enough. Especially if you buy them in a charity shop in early January, where they’re usually half-price or even less. It’s the cost of postage that is off-putting. Even a second-class stamp is now 75 pence. But, get this, an international stamp is now £2.20 regardless of where in the world you send it. Europe or Australia, it’s the same price. The postage on a letter from Dover to Calais is the same as one from Aberdeen to Sydney. Crazy. Doubtless, Royal Mail will claim this is due to Brexit, but it’s just blatant profiteering.

It actually costs £2.20 to send a letter from the UK to the Republic of Ireland. Even if you are posting it from half-a-mile over the border. Which makes absolutely no sense in this day and age when RyanAir are offering one-way flights from Edinburgh to Dublin for as little as £14.99. For anyone with five or more relatives over the water, it would be cheaper to fly there and deliver them by hand. Having said that, you’d have to be pretty desperate to keep in touch with your family if you were prepared to fly RyanAir.

Imagine if airlines took a similar attitude to pricing. They would never get away with charging £1500 for a return flight to Amsterdam, because that’s what it costs to go to Melbourne. My parents used Christmas cards, or the lack of them, as a means of telling whether their friends were still alive. If someone failed to send them a card by December 23, they assumed they must have died. This year, if I don’t hear from friends at Christmas, I’ll assume they’ve gone bankrupt by writing to their cousins in Ireland.