I see the Post Office is preparing for another strike, so I'm in a race against time. Somewhere out there, humming and fizzing in the real-world version of cyberspace, are my postcards from Réunion. I wrote them to various people throughout my stay on the island, at the breakfast table or under a frangipani tree or sitting on a hot stone bench outside the church of St Anne waiting for the light to soften, but I foolishly waited till the last day to post them, so now they're like homing pigeons flapping against the dusk, trying to make it home before someone closes the coop.I love receiving mail, especially handwritten mail. At the beginning of each year I receive a card from a particular family in Johannesburg that I've never met.It's illustrated with a line drawing of all the gathered family members fishing or reading or doing various things that I assume are characteristic of each of them. It's one of the genuine delights of my year and I'm acutely embarrassed by the fact that I haven't yet written in reply to the most recent card. (I hope they'll accept this apology.)When I was a student I lived in Cape Town and my girlfriend was in Grahamstown, and I didn't have a telephone and couldn't afford to use the payphone more than once a week or so, and even then it was stilted and unsatisfying, fraught with silences and suspicion. There was something about hearing each other's voices that drained away our better selves and higher feelings and replaced them with "Who's that in the background?" and "What's wrong? You don't seem happy to hear from me."When Nkosana Makate had this difficulty he invented the Please Call Me and subsequently became rich and briefly united black and white South Africans in their shared love of the underdog against the fat cat. I should have done that, but he had ingenuity and enterprise whereas all I had was access to a post office.The best part of that romance was the hours spent waiting for the postman to arrive, bringing a letter she has written - with her own hands! - and folded and placed in an envelope she has licked - with her own tongue! Using what was hopefully her own saliva! - and carried to a post office and sent away to me. Her fingerprints are on that letter, there are traces of her DNA dusted through it. Something that was there, touching her, is now here, being touched by me! And that agonising erotic delay, knowing that her words are somewhere in the world, trying to reach me, crossing somewhere with mine going to her . I've been in long-distance relationships in the days before and after instant electronic communication, and both are hard, but I believe the old days were easier, because the lag created a languorous rhythm, a give and a take. Your feelings existed as a slow ache, not impatience or irritation. The distance made sense.In Stephen Robins' book Letters of Stone he uncovers a cache of letters sent by his Jewish grandmother in Berlin in the late 1930s to her sons who managed to flee to South Africa before the Nazis and the National Party closed the borders. They are devastatingly poignant, especially in the passages where she's pretending that everything is still fine, when she's describing his grandfather's weekly card games (now being played in their living room because Jews aren't allowed in the cafés) or how the weather was on her birthday. Robins tells us how her handwriting becomes suddenly spiky and erratic, even as she's describing mundane things, as though the pressures on her heart are making themselves visible through her hand, no matter how she tries to conceal them. Her body is insisting on being known, is writing itself on the page, and it's still there to be discovered today by a grandson who never knew her.There's no turning back from the electronic age, of course, and I wouldn't even if I could, because I quite like the fact that I can write this five minutes before deadline and don't have to leave this house, but surely there's space for both intimacy and immediacy. A while ago I received a postcard from my pal Paige Nick, promoting the launch of her new novel, Dutch Courage. It was a mass mailing but there were handwritten words on the back, written especially for me, so probably one day when I die and the mutant scavengers of a post-apocalyptic world go through my things by the light of their single headlamp eye they'll come across that card among my effects and think, "How nice. This person wrote something for that person. It must have been a much nicer world back then."..