sent from: London, UK. destination: Santa Monica, California, USA

I was staring at this spare ballot paper, wondering what to do with it. Maria came up with the excellent idea of marking which postcard numbers had not arrived from Year One of the project, so I devised a simple colour key for not arrived, not sent and unknown and marked the relevant numbers. They don’t quite reach as high as I needed, but it’s ok.
I’ve always loved taking data and seeing the ways people express it in other forms. Like the Year One stats comic last week, or this brilliant audiovisualisation of different sorting algorithms.

I was asked about the story behind the two cards that I didn’t send in Year One.

The first one was #36. It wasn’t a very good idea to start with – to stick a newspaper sudoku to the card, but because my glueing skills are equal that of a 6 month old baby with uncertain motor skills, it turned into a big mess, and I couldn’t send it out. 

The second one was #318 a card that was never meant to be sent in the first place. Well it was already sent, by me in 1994 to my mother, and she gave it back to me. I remembered writing it and I had to include it in the project. Maria called it a Time Travelling postcard. I don’t think we’ll be ooh-ing over emails from 20 years ago in the same way.

Of the three unknowns, two of them should really be re-classified as ‘not arrived’. 

Only one of them, #365 to the Irish poet Pat Ingoldsby, is one that I am pretty sure I’ll never know if it reached him or not.