Cursives!
I’m sitting here watching my elder child practice his cursive writing, to the tune of much complaining. I don’t really have a need for him to practice but I found a one dollar place mat (write on! wipe off!) at the craft store with the upper case alphabet on one side and the lower case on the other.*
My own handwriting has deteriorated mightily since the mid-nineties when we got our first computer. Even then, I preferred to write long hand. It felt as if I were more organically in touch with the words that flowed from my hand. The pen felt like an extension of myself in a way that a keyboard did not. I even used a fountain pen, the kind that you fill from a jar of ink, which might have carried an element of pretention about it, but if it did, it’s an okay kind of pretention, the kind that leaves you with a writing callous stained blue.
Now, however, I have been absorbed by the machine and write twice as fast when I’m typing as when I’m scrawling. And I do scrawl. My once reasonably handwriting, at speed, is now illegible. And my hand aches terribly. I used to produce pages and pages of writing. The thought is somewhat worrying to me now. What? No keyboard? No computer? The horror! The horror!
Still, I think it’s a good idea that my child is being forced to learn joined-up writing, even if for no other reason than suffering builds character. But I think I might procure a calligraphy set and leave it lying around. It would be a shame if the inked word vanished altogether. There is something so raw and real about the physical process of applying ink to paper, something absent from the tap of fingertips on computer.
In fact, I think I’m going to go look for my pen.
*And since anachronistic longing is clearly the mood of the day, I adore that the terms upper and lower case refer most concretely to typesetters’ boxes, when the plugs of lead that would stamp the capital letters were in the higher case, and the smaller were in the lower.
Where do you find a fountain pen which you fill using ink from a jar? I’ve wanted one for a while (I have a long running obsession with pens) and have actively resisted spending several hundred £s in the Mont Blanc shop.
Hey Rahul! Actually, the pens are inherited from my parents, but I had the idea that they were relatively easy to come by in the UK — you can get the ones you plunk an ink cartridge into, right? Well, there are these little adapters, like plastic tubes with a plunger you draw up when the nib is in the ink. Not as fun as the rubber bladders of yore, but still more fun (and messy) than cartridges. Good luck!
http://www.thewritingdesk.co.uk/showcat.php?cat=Spares
It’s a Uk site (of course) but it shows the converters – and they sell purple ink – and pretty much every other colour ink you can imagine, which is why I like them…