My father sent himself a postcard from every city he visited for work. He wrote it on the first evening, before he had seen anything, and posted it before he left. The rule was that he could only write what he expected. They arrived at our house weeks later, sometimes after he was already home, and he read them at the kitchen table with a particular expression. "Wrong about Lyon," he would say, and put it in the box. I found the box after he retired. There are two hundred and six. Most of them are wrong in the same direction. He expected cities to be beautiful and found them ordinary. He expected people to be difficult and found them helpful. He expected to be lonely, wrote about it in advance almost every time, and then usually was not, because somebody in an office had taken him to dinner. A few are wrong in the other direction. Prague, 1998: "Everyone says it is wonderful. I will send you the truth." He wrote nothing at all on the back of the card he posted from Prague the following year, and I take that as an admission. The interesting ones are the late ones. After about 2006 they get shorter and much more accurate, because by then he had been almost everywhere twice and had stopped expecting anything. The last one is from Rotterdam. It says: "I know exactly what this will be like. That is the problem." I have started doing it, badly. I forget to post them, or I write them at the airport on the way home, which defeats the purpose entirely. But I have four now, and I am already wrong about three of them.