SPECTATOR doesn’t generally have a lot of time for marketing stunts, but is prepared to make an exception for Cumbria Tourism which this week has urged us all to rediscover the art of writing and sending a postcard.

Hardly surprisingly, the age of Twitter and other forms of social networking associated with the internet have had an adverse effect on the great British postcard. Sales are falling as we lose the habit of drafting four or five pithy sentences on the back, sticking a stamp on it and then putting it in a postbox.

How quaint that may sound to some.

The tourism chaps want us all to send more postcards (when on our hols in the Lakes, of course) but then score something of an owngoal by providing a website wishyouwereherecumbria.

co.uk to send one online.

Otters in the Tees

MORE evidence of the return of otters to the lower reaches of the River Tees. A couple of months ago a reader reported a sighting at Low Coniscliffe, now a Spectator spy brings news of a pair seen frolicking (if that’s the correct terminology for otters) in the fast-flowing and full river at Broken Scar.

Identity slip

OH dear, the signwriters at Darlington Civic Theatre have changed the nationality of the man who played such a significant part in the theatre’s beginnings.

Directional information pointing the way to the bar named after the Civic’s founding father, Signor Rino Pepe, has turned him into a Spaniard – Senor Pepe. A fluffed line no less.

Church lives

In our Cleveland edition this week, the report of the annual meeting of the Stokesley parochial church council tells us that last year the parish church was the scene of only five weddings, five baptisms and ten funerals.

Part of the reason may be the lack of incumbent for most of the year but, nevertheless, does it not suggest that the Anglican church is playing nothing more than a peripheral part in the lives of most Stokesley citizens? The church finances are not too clever either. Spectator suspects the parish will be by no means unique.