But i'm sure as any good techy knows that if you're going on holiday you have to be incommunicado....

Whatever *needs* doing right this ultimate second at work can wait until you get back, plus a week to get out of the holiday mood!

Whenever i get away, i turn my phone off too, no phone, no internet, no nothing, just pure silence.

So what? This happens all the way through the book of history:

Where are all the gas lamp manufacturers gone?

118118 couldn't put me in touch with any mud hut builders?

I can't find anyone who makes wooden stocks in yellow pages

And the only suits of armour I can get these days are made of plastic and come from party shops

As one industry grows, often another dies. It's how we evolve and develop. People have to adapt or go extinct.

I get sick of these stories; living in Devon, West-cuntry Live is full of this crap.

Campaigns to save centuries-old buildings that have no use other than giving justification to yet another museum (why do we need Isombard Brunel's pumping station preserved ffs?)

No wonder we're falling behind on the global stage, we are too busy looking backward to see where we're going.

100 years from now, mobile phones may not exist, replaced by some ear/mouth implant or something, then we'll get all teary-eyed about the death of the mobile industry (the very thing that's at "blame" for postcard extinction)

Nostalgia is fine, but let's not overdo it, peeps.

Why don't the "seaside postcard" industry adapt instead of whining - create MMS "postcards" that can be either downloaded from a site or bought on SD card from the local souvenir shops that they can plug in then send via text? Same idea, but embracing the changes in technology and habits (and helping the environment by not wasting all that card)

"Where are all the gas lamp manufacturers gone?

118118 couldn't put me in touch with any mud hut builders?

I can't find anyone who makes wooden stocks in yellow pages

And the only suits of armour I can get these days are made of plastic and come from party shops"

Number 3 should be easy if you trawl BDSM specialists. Bound to be some loony environmentalists who could set you up with 2 (wasn't there a story about someone building something similar in this very organ?) Similarly there's got to be some ren faire nuts who insist on the full sweaty experience of 4. 1 is the only one I can genuinely imagine not having any appeal to modern luddites/fantasists/weirdos, and I expect eBay and/or Google could probably set me straight if I could be bothered to look properly.

Ploo sa shanj, ploo say la mem shoes, whatever that means (fear my modern "relevant to employers' needs" education).

How about they just sell their designs as hi-res jpegs to some e-card companies or hell, make a special one, e-cards of great britain with whole sea-side sections which can be animated and sent with voice messages and all sorts.

The future can be whatever we want it to be. I hope saucy british postcards will always be available - however, I will still look down my nose at them and treat them with contempt.

I live in the "historic" (spit) Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC, full of houses a century-plus old, and there are more than a few of them that are restored to the "official" Historic Preservation Trust "standards" -- including gas lamps at the front doors where most of our houses here (even those extensively "fixed up") have long since replaced them with nice, clean, efficient, non-smelly electric front-door lamps.

"Some 67 per cent admitted to going online to, say, send an email or upload photos while sunning themselves."

There must be some right pervs about if their taking real photos of fat ladies in swim wear and sending it back home to the relatives...