[Thanks to Dad for the title pun]
The previous diary entry is, I’m fairly certain, my first to be drafted in longhand. I’m startled by just how out of practice I am with the medium. The last time I was regularly composing prose of any length away from a computer, as opposed to just taking notes, must have been at school.
No, it’s later than that. It would have been writing letters to friends and family in the early half of the 1990s. Then email came along, which suited me so innately that I acquired an email address two years before owning a Net-compatible computer. Somewhere along the line, the parts of my brain used for regularly setting down linear prose – with very few mistakes – began to rust and stiffen. At a computer keyboard, I can rattle out words fluidly, chopping and changing and chiseling till I’m more or less happy. I simply hurl words at a screen, then arrange them in a pleasing order afterwards. Mistakes are so easy to correct and purge from the digital manuscript, with no trace left to muse over. Computers train the mind to see writing as a final version of linear perfection, belying the work that went into it. Perhaps this doesn’t matter to others, particularly those of younger generations who grew up writing on computers, but on the strength of two entries so far, I think it matters to me.
When I decided to force myself back into longhand drafts, it was partly out of a concern to cut down my dependency on electricity or expensive equipment; a back-up on paper being always wise. But it was also because I’m ashamed that my then high-graded teenage knowledge of French, German, Latin and (to a lesser extent) Esperanto had been bevelled down to a few bare phrases of each, through sheer lack of use. As the vernacular of the day would have it, one must use it or lose it. And I was beginning to worry that I was losing the ability to compose in longhand entirely.
So yesterday I started the entry about the strange man on my doorstep. I eschewed my Mac iBook for a pocket Moleskine notebook – the squared paper variety – with a Parker Vector fountain pen and a cartridge of Quink black ink. I’d been experimenting with a couple of other cheap fountains – the Parker Reflex and the Lamy Safari – but the Vector seemed to work best for me. I can actually read my own handwriting with it.
But this tentative step into longhand composition turned out to be hard going. The entry faltered, meandered and spluttered to a halt. Admittedly my severe day-long hangover was probably part of the equation, rendering any reading (let alone writing) nigh-on impossible without a splitting headache. After starting and stopping throughout the afternoon, I reluctantly gave up and vowed to try again the next day.
This morning I awoke with a whimsical compulsion (I rarely have any other kind) to buy an old-fashioned A5 school exercise book, with a proper stapled spine. I spent a deliriously happy hour or so looking at the various dusty brands in the many newsagents and stationers of North London, including brands by the Post Office and WH Smith. The outright winner so far, I am pleased to report, has to be the 20-leaves red Silvine Exercise Book Ref 130F, with the matt finish, lovely old logo and a list of conversion tables on the back cover, including ‘Area And Mensuration’. Capital Newsagents of Tottenham Court Road sell them for 60p each.
Some people get hot under the collar about the latest developlements for Mac computers, iPods or mobile phones. I get a similar thrill from 60p exercise books.
Apart from the expected barcode tucked away on the back, the design has remained the same for decades:
