My postman was born and spent his early years in Chile and this winter took three months leave of absence to visit his former home and travel in Chile, Peru and Ecuador including Easter Island and the Galapagos.

Thanks to the miracle of digital photography he was able to record this trip in some detail. He promised to share the joys of the journey with me and last night together with some neighbours we gathered in my kitchen for this treat.

Now we all know that the pleasure of viewing other peoples’ holiday snaps has its ups and downs so to cater for the downs I had laid in some nibbles and a few refreshments. The downs were immediately apparent when he turned up with four DVDs and announced that he had 4000 photographs. My heart lightened somewhat when he said we could skip quickly over many of them and lightened a lot more when it proved impossible to read his DVDs on my machine.

I was all for making polite expressions of regret, refilling my glass and tucking into the nibbles but in view of his obvious disappointment (he has been waiting since February for a means to show the neighbours his pics) I felt impelled to ask if he still had the flash memory cards. Indeed he did so dashed off home and returned with camera and cards.

Then came the tedious job of transferring them to my PC. After some false starts we had 5 gigabytes of pictures loaded with 3 to go. We were now an hour and a half into the proceedings and hadn’t seen a single photo except for when they lumbered past during the transfer.

So we started to view. Now some of the pictures were really interesting and a number were lovely and with a slideshow of say 25% of the total Jean might have stayed the course. But he is in his 90s after all. He was the first to go – no I tell a lie – that was Alain who was glad of the excuse of the non-readable DVDs, downed his pastis at that point and fled. Josette followed Jean an hour or so later and I was left showing the postie out some five hours after his arrival with his cheery promise to return to show the remaining 3 gig at a future date ringing in my ears.