Time-travelling postcards finally arrive
This postcard belonging to Denis O'Regan was delivered 17 years after it was sent from Corfu.
Friday December 11 2009
MYSTERY surrounds the journey of three postcards that all arrived at their Cork destination in the past week -- up to 20 years after they were posted from holiday sunspots.
The first card was written in and posted from Kastellani in Corfu in 1992, before embarking on a 2,600km journey to finish at Tower Street in Cork, 17 years, four months and 11 days later.
Bearing a Greek postmark dated July 24, 1992, the card arrived through the letterbox of 77-year-old Denis 'Dinny' O'Regan's Tower Street home, last Friday, December 4.
The postcard was written by Dinny's then teenage daughters, Val and Helaine, who had been enjoying a break on the shores of the Greek island.
Val (32) and Helaine (35) have found love, settled down, married and had children since popping the card in the post to their parents.
"I couldn't believe it when I saw it; I thought, what in the name of God is this?" Dinny said, describing his reaction to the post last Friday. "I handed it to my wife and she didn't know what to make of it either. She said it to the postman since; she asked him if he knew where it had been," he said.
The girls, who would have been listening to chart-topping tunes like Red Hot Chili Peppers' 'Under the Bridge' or Jimmy Nail's 'Ain't No Doubt', wrote to tell their parents they had met plenty of people who were "a good crack".
Mystery
They wrote on the card that the "weather is unreal", "the nightlife is wild", and they were "lying on the beach in the sun".
Still in remarkably good condition for an item that was lost for the best part of two decades, the card bears no traces of where it might have been.
Bemused Dinny, a retired gate porter at St Finbarr's Hospital, plans to have it framed and hung on the sitting room wall "for the craic".
Adding even more mystery, two more postcards arrived at the O'Regan house yesterday morning, one the girls posted from Greece in 1991 and another posted to Helaine from a friend in Tenerife in 1989.
"We've no idea where they were or how many more are coming," Helaine said.
- Louise Roseingrave
Irish Independent
