Observing life: What happened to my handwriting?

I used to write a diary. I was so faithful to it that it was probably the closest relationship I had throughout my teenage and prepubescent years. Almost daily I would spend hours pouring my thoughts and feelings onto the pages and then, days or weeks later, cringe at the sentiments when I flicked back through them. Even as I matured, I always carried a notebook and pen with me. You could argue that this was an occupational must, given my chosen career as a journalist, but more often than not, dispersed among my reporter’s notes were anecdotes, poems or sometimes small doodles that I would lovingly paste into my diary when I had a spare moment at home.

This week, I was compelled to go to my diary and realised, as I opened it, that I hadn’t made an entry since March – and the last time before that was in November. In fact, since May last year, I had filled very few pages of my journal. I was upset. “What happened?” I wrote, pleading with the blank pages to be full of scrawlings from my mind.

Then, as I began to write in earnest, making up for lost time, I realised that my hand was aching and my mind was wandering after only half a page. My hand wasn’t working fast enough to transfer my 21st-century speeding thoughts.

The problem, it dawned on me, was that I have forgotten how to write. This doesn’t mean that I have lost the ability to construct sentences or paragraphs – thank goodness, or else I’d be out of a job – no, it means that the now old-fashioned concept of picking up a pen or pencil to jot down notes has all but disappeared from our lives.

Now, if I have a flash of inspiration, I make a note of it in my aptly titled “Notes” folder on my iPhone. If I want to write a poem, a short story or a well-versed piece of prose, I fire up my trusty MacBook.

My once-beloved pens lie in a drawer, collecting dust and are used only to write out shopping lists or the occasional birthday card (even these have been largely replaced by e-cards).

During my interviews for The National, I rarely even take out my notebook and pen. Instead, I record the whole thing and transcribe it later. If it is a phone interview, it is much quicker for me to type out the words directly on my laptop than scribble them down.

I vividly remember my first information technology lessons at school, when the teacher was showing us how to touch type. I fumbled with the keypad, made slow progress and remembered thinking that I would never get the hang of it and, anyway, I didn’t want to be a secretary so it didn’t matter.

I don’t remember when it happened, but touch-typing came naturally to me years ago. I guess with so much practise it was bound to happen, but I wasn’t ready to sacrifice my handwriting. I mean, of course I still can physically write with a pen, it is just that if I want something written quickly and efficiently and with the added bonus of an automatic spell corrector, of course, I come to the keypad. My diary, as a consequence, remains unwritten.