SOMETIMES, it can’t be typed, spoken or texted – sometimes it can’t even be twittered. Sometimes you’ve got to pick up the pen and write something with your own hand. Last week I was sending a birthday card to someone in the form of a re-purposed Christmas card because I am a classy, thoughtful guy, and having assembled the materials and found the time and space in which to write it, I was so shocked by the scrawl my hand had committed to the card that I ripped it up, threw it out and went to the shop to buy another.
n the shop, I found a quiet corner and a reasonably flat surface and produced my pen, and went about doing it right, with a stack of Cadbury’s flake boxes for a table and a foot stool for a seat. A proper birthday card for a birthday, properly written. This was more like it.
Okay, so I wasn't perched at an architect's desk with the music of Deep Forestdrifting across the background, but the point is that I took the time to do it over, and when I had re-written the message, I was shocked all over again. This should not have happened. Even my best, most mindful effort was an entirely illegible mess. I knew what the card said because I had dreamed up the pithy message all by myself, but had I found it on the road, I'd have thought it was a shopping list or a medical prescription of some kind. Disgraceful.
After all those years sitting at wooden desks with my tongue out, practising joined-up writing, I have gone and forgotten how to perform the simple act of handwriting. My niece is seven, and her writing is significantly better than mine – beautiful letters, all joined up. But by the time she is my age, she’ll have forgotten how to write that well, too.
In fact, the exact point at which she now stands – the innocent pre-technological years in which she doesn’t yet have access to a mobile phone or a laptop – that is the golden age of calligraphy. The decline comes right after, and there is a precedent. Her mother used to take the time to draw small flowers in lieu of full stops and dots, and now her writing is as spidery as mine.
To confirm that my writing was once legible (if not beautiful) I dug out some school notebooks, and there it was. In evolution, the handwriting of an adult me would clearly have to shed some of those innocent, chubby characteristics, but it was entirely readable – not fitting for an adult in their thirties, but still legible. So how did I get from there to here? I think it’s all about a wonky kind of aspiration. As a kid, I wanted my signature to be like that of other adults, autographs of sports stars slashed across programmes. To me, there was such a thing as grown-up writing, and only now in adulthood, do I realise grown-up writing means bad writing.
People have been warning of the death of handwriting for a half-century, and probably further back in history, since the advent of the telephone and the typewriter. But the creeping ubiquity of computers is certainly accelerating this demise of writing in general. Not only does it hurt your handwriting, but it hurts your spelling. These days, when you’re typing on a computer, you only have to approximate the word you want and the spell checker will make it right. Take the word “approximate”. Back there, I just entered the non-word “apprxomte” in a crude bashing manner with my fingers, and some computer program sorted the whole mess out for me. That’s all well and good for now, but it makes me wonder whether, in 10 years’ time, when by some unique and yet unimaginable set of circumstances I have to hand write the word “approximate” on a piece of paper in order to secure my survival, whether I’ll pass the test.
Without anyone telling us, technology has also welded the arts of editing and writing together. On a computer, not one sentence – not even one clause – is written before the understandable human instinct to go back and correct it kicks in. It doesn’t matter if we’re writing a quick e-mail or a book. As soon as the first part of a line has been committed to the screen, we want to abandon the forward momentum of composition – the very idea that got us writing in the first place – and go back and do the line over. The editor in us wants to fix what has barely been uttered; a kind of double-think that can’t be compatible with free expression.
In an attempt to re-establish the pure thought and idea of writing, a writer I know has abandoned the computer in favour of the pen and paper. Maybe they all write this way . . . in this and in many other instances to do with how we write and read, I am reminded of my English teacher. He was the guy who wrote the insightful notes in the margin of my hideously derivative school essays, and his handwriting was perfectly neat without any signs of its childhood origins.
Rather than come out and say that he was pretty sure that my essay about the guy working in the corner shop was a steal from the work of noted English scholars such as Morrissey or Paul Weller or whichever music was preoccupying me that week (stealing ideas from rockstars and passing them off as one’s own was rife in English class), he would offer a nugget of encouragement in the margin, or a subtle, beautifully composed diss. His writing was the best. If I was still being taught by him today I could imagine what it would say along the margin – “this is at best a tweet”.