Love writing

I love writing. Whether it’s any good or not, the process of getting thoughts out of my head and into print gives me such pleasure. It is cathartic, restorative and helps me get my thoughts straight. It also helps by giving me a large amount of reference material to go back to when I need to draw upon my experiences, which is often.

I’ve been writing for a long time now, that is the formal production of material. My blog is a dozen or so years old and I have written two books with, hopefully, another one to come. When I say writing, I mean the typing of characters onto a computer screen, saved in document format and occasionally printed out. What I don’t mean is the physical process of putting pen to paper. I’ve been doing that on and off (mostly off) since school.

At work, since at least the last ten years, I had almost completely stopped using a pen. Everything was either done on my laptop or my phone. I stopped carrying a pad to write in though I did carry a pen just in case. My whole work life moved from analogue to digital. I was very much at the vanguard of the  modern ways of working movement. Before that, when working at Spicers (at the time Europe’s largest distributor of office products) I wrote a bit more and, as I was in the trade, got hold of a decent fountain pen or two including a couple of Parker Duofolds. I kidded myself that they made me write better though this was very much in doubt.

Now that my life is starting to slow down, administratively at least, I thought it would be nice to start writing by hand again. I dug out my fountain panes and sent one off to Vintage Pens to be serviced. Back it has come and I was thrilled to unscrew the cap and draw the first lines across a virgin page. Needless to say my writing hasn’t improved, indeed it has got worse and after a few lines my wrist was aching. Writing by hand and subsequently reading it back is hard. 

I’ll send my other pen away in a couple of weeks and, who knows, may venture into another colour ink!

There is something magical about moving your hand across a page and seeing your thoughts appear. It’s an old-school pleasure. It will take a few weeks before I get back into my stride yet I am going to persevere. If anything I am tenacious and may well need to be on my latest adventure.