What is the best way to write? Like any working journalist, I have long prided myself on my ability to compose straight on to the keyboard. I learnt this before the arrival of computers, on big manual typewriters. Any journalist who wrote down an article first in longhand would have been gently chided, at least - more likely sneered at for amateurishness.
Moreover, in the collective atmosphere of a newsroom, you learnt to write with people chatting to you at the same time, or barking into phones. A writer who needed peace and quiet would be better off looking for a different job, away from the news editor occasionally reading your work over your shoulder, or maybe even tearing it out of the typewriter, screwing it up in a ball and throwing it away.
Those of us who who have been hardened beyond self-consciousness by such experience pride ourselves on being able to write in difficult conditions, without self-indulgence, without affectation, without fear.
When we hear about poets who need a dozen sharpened pencils and a particular weight of vellum, we snort. We know what writing is: it is a job.
Still, I first learnt to write on the kitchen table at home, on lined jotters, first with stubby pencils, later with fountain pens and only later still with Biros. I was touching 20 before I could use a typewriter and I was in my 30s when I first used a word-processor.
And I admit now that, though I can write on cumbersome equipment in a crowded environment, it may be that the very best, most comfortable way for me to write is the way I wrote when I was a child. That was when my verbalising brain connected with my hand to produce language in script form.
When I was 14, my mother gave me a Conway Stewart fountain pen which she had owned since before I was born. She fancied I was now a man who could use a proper writing tool. The Conway Stewart was about five-and-a-half inches long with its cap on. It had a reflective enamel surface with a pattern suggestive of broken leaves - little clusters of near parallel lines that might have originated as someone else's doodle with a similar pen.
I hated to disappoint her, but the Conway Stewart was not the sort of heavy-duty tool a schoolboy needed. The sac was too small. The lever on one side for filling it snagged your thumbnail when it was stiff and you could never tell whether the pen was full or not.
Then, if you didn't have a bottle of ink with you when you ran dry, you would have to ask the boy beside you to squeeze a drop from his more efficient Parker 51 on to your nib. It was a deft manoeuvre, but it could be done.
I recently paid £83 to the pen museum for that same pen. It was the start of a growing fixation with fountain pens, which I justified as the search for the perfect writing instrument. Or was I regressing to a more natural way of doing things?
Key the words "Conway Stewart" into eBay and you'll get some idea of how many other people have fallen for the same fixation and what it is costing them. The Belfast poet Ciaran Carson tells me he has 200 fountain pens now. He sneers at my Lamy Accent with the briar stem: too modern.
My fascination extends to inks now. Just because I wrote in Stevens blue-black at school doesn't mean I can't write now in Orange Crush, Spearmint, Avocado or Copper Burst.
I find I like writing in longhand on nice notebooks with nice pens. But this is not a revolt against the latest writing technology.
I have another tool which complements my writing by hand. About five or 10 years ago, many people like myself bought speech recognition software, trained it with reading exercises and then discovered that it didn't work.
I came back to it two years ago, on the recommendation of another writer, and found that the updated technology works very well indeed. Like the macho typist that I was when I worked in a newspaper office, I can take pride in dictating an article directly into my computer without using my hands at all. I evangelise for it among other writers and journalists, but few of them take it up.
Still, I find that the most satisfying way to write is in longhand with a good pen, say a Lamy Accent or a Pelikan Epoch, and to read this scrawled draft into my computer. This, I believe is a more creative way to write, because it uses that channel between my brain and my fingers formed in the early years. And, incidentally, it improves the functioning of the speech recognition software, because it enables me to read to it in a modulated dictation.
So that's my justification to the determinedly modern. I'm actually ahead of them.