Ellie Sets Off for Greece After Receiving a Postcard

Ellie Thomas’s decision to travel to Greece grows out of a sustained exchange with an absent, anonymous sender. The postcards first gather on a corkboard as bright images of sea, sky, boats and whitewashed buildings; gradually, their places become imaginable destinations and the country enters Ellie’s daily life. When the cards fall silent, she chooses to go and see for herself whether the promised light is real. Her departure turns a private longing, built week by week from pictures and place names, into a journey—and begins with a package she has no time to open.

The Postcards Become a Map

At first Ellie treats the cards as stray mail that cannot be returned because their sender is unknown and signs only with A. Rather than throw them away, she pins them to a corkboard that had served little purpose beyond holding the occasional shopping list and a scrap bearing her National Insurance number. Their repeated palette of blue and white—skies, sea, boats, whitewashed walls and blue shutters—gradually makes the board into a colourful mosaic. The Greek flag appears in the same colours, adding a repeated visual note to the growing collection.

The names on the cards extend the pictures into an imagined route. Methoni, Mystras, Monemvasia, Nafpaktos, Nafplio, Olympia and Sparta sound to Ellie like unfamiliar words with a musical quality. In April, three cards arrive together, and she responds by finding an old atlas, tearing out a page and pinning it beside the board. She marks Arta, Preveza and Meteora, turning the sender’s scattered images into a journey she can follow. Mapping the places is more than a practical exercise: it gives shape to a country that she has never visited but is increasingly allowing into her life.

An Imagined Escape from London

The postcards promise a change in atmosphere as well as scenery. During the winter Ellie leaves for work before dawn and returns at seven, with the curtains of her flat in Kensal Rise remaining closed; the arrival of spring does not bring the light inside. Having moved from Cardiff to London with hopes that the city would be brighter, she finds that her life there has not become what she expected. The postcards are the things that cheer her, and each new place added to the board helps sustain the possibility of elsewhere.

Her job selling advertising space in a trade magazine has never excited her. She took it because a recruitment agency presented it as a route into publishing, but the route proves indirect. Ellie meets her sales targets, helped by clients’ response to her Welsh voice, and spends spare time looking online at Greek images and information. Around her, other young workers imagine a life on stage; her own wish points somewhere beyond the West End. As the summer brings cards from Andros and Ikaria, their shimmering seas and skies intensify the pull. The images seem almost impossibly beautiful, and Ellie wonders whether such places are real or have been airbrushed.

From Waiting to Booking the Journey

When no postcard arrives for weeks, Ellie discovers how much the sequence has come to matter. Each morning in August she checks her pigeonhole and feels disappointed when it is empty. A visit to her parents in Cardiff sharpens her sense of separation from her peers: old schoolfriends are married and starting families, and a former bridesmaid asks Ellie to become a godmother. She accepts, yet feels unsettled by the distance between their lives and hers. Returning to London, she finds the pigeonhole still vacant and calculates that more than a month has passed since the card from Ikaria.

Back in her flat, the cards have begun to curl on the board, although their colours remain vivid. Their beauty now provokes a practical question: whether the skies and light they depict correspond to anything outside the postcard. Ellie checks a passport last used two years earlier for a hen weekend in Spain, then finds a flight to Athens for less than the cheap boots she has just bought in Cardiff. She has travelled only modestly—to Spain, Portugal and France—and is not an adventurous traveller. Even so, she researches accommodation, recognizes Nafplio as one of the places on the cards, and books a week of half-board at a nearby beach resort for one hundred and twenty pounds. She hopes to see Nafplio and perhaps more of the route A has taken. The decision is spontaneous, but to Ellie it also feels planted by the months of collecting and imagining.

The choice carries a test beyond tourism. Ellie wants to discover whether people in Greece really talk to strangers and invite them places, as A’s messages suggest. In three years in London, nobody from work has invited her anywhere, and she has never expected an invitation from a stranger in a café. The trip therefore offers the possibility of encountering a different social life, not simply of checking whether the postcard scenery is accurate. When she asks her smooth-talking boss for ten days’ holiday, his casual instruction to get in touch on her return leaves her wondering whether she has been fired. Even the uncertainty at work does not stop her. As her boarding pass prints, she is already thinking that she will not miss the windowless room and its banks of telephones.

Departure and the Unopened Package

On the night before the journey, excitement keeps Ellie nearly sleepless. She then sleeps through her alarm and wakes only when drunks in the street disturb her. Behind schedule, she pulls on the previous day’s clothes, checks the locks and lights, and leaves with her case. While wheeling it toward the outer door, she notices something protruding from her pigeonhole. Though already an hour later than planned, she feels compelled to retrieve it.

The package is hardback-sized and covered with more than a dozen stamps stuck at different angles. The franking machine has obliterated the name, but the address remains legible, and Ellie recognizes the handwriting immediately; her heart beats faster. There is no time to open it. She puts it in her handbag and continues toward the night bus and the coach station for Stansted, spending the next two hours thinking only about catching her plane. The package makes the departure more than a clean break: the correspondence that drew Ellie toward Greece has produced a new, unexplained object at precisely the moment she leaves. Its contents remain unknown in this scene, while the journey begins without resolving the mystery of the sender.

The Postcard Image and the Encountered Country

The book later places postcard-like beauty beside a less accommodating reality, but through a different traveler’s experience, not Ellie’s. After staying in Thessaloniki, the first-person traveler makes a slow journey down the east coast through Katerini, Larissa, Volos and Lamia, then reaches an unnamed fishing village by a rough track. It appears almost ideally composed: a sheltered harbour, colourful boats, a sandy cove beneath pine trees, and old olive trees on the surrounding hills. Yet the residents show little interest in visitors. Restaurant patrons dismiss requests for a table, the village has no hotels or pensions, and even basic tourist goods such as sun lotion, straw hats and postcards are unavailable.

That contrast gives the departure its wider significance without turning Ellie’s expectation into an experience she has not yet had. The postcards make Greece vivid through selected images and promise a form of welcome Ellie hopes London has denied her. The later village scene shows that a beautiful setting does not guarantee hospitality, and that the lived country can resist the tourist’s picture. Ellie’s journey starts in the gap between those possibilities: the images have made Greece desirable, but only travel can test what they leave out.