Life

Nuala McCann: The future of hand writing is still being written

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Some traditions - like handwritten Christmas cards and writing in fountain pen - are worth saving
Some traditions - like handwritten Christmas cards and writing in fountain pen - are worth saving Some traditions - like handwritten Christmas cards and writing in fountain pen - are worth saving

CONFESSION to make: I'm a pen thief, a magpie, a voleur in the grand tradition of voleurs.

It's never conscious but if anyone lends me a pen, it ends up in my pocket.

Open a bag, pull open a drawer, look on a shelf and see how the pens have gathered.

In among my collection of cheap plastic biros advertising booze and blood donation and heart disease charities, a few are treasures.

When I put my hand on my father's old fountain pen, the years slip by, and there he sits, in our living room, signing a cheque.

It's a squat old fashioned fountain pen - maroon on the bottom, for maroon is a manly colour - and silver on the top.

It has a rubber reservoir and he twists the black plastic top on the bottle of blue Quink ink and dips the pen in.

In that long ago, the process held a kind of magic.

And when he wrote, the ink flowed and flowered across the paper - the beauty of the finished letter, the flourish of a well-practised signature. His writing was beautiful.

Writing was an art form then, in the days before iPads and computers and a quick swipe right or left that could spell the beginning of a whole new relationship.

Writing back then was almost religious... think Seamus Heaney finding his place in the world:

"Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."

Think too of my friends who are writers who never fell under the spell of the typewriter, the word processor, the easy delete key.

Long hand was their way always.

And when you read the work of writers like Heaney - their drafts and re-drafts, words scored out and changed - the whole mystery of how a poem comes to be is laid bare.

My parents' generation were taught to write copperplate - slopes and loops.

My mother's signature was fluent and beautiful until her end days, when arthritic hands refused to play ball with her brain, and her words turned shaky.

Old age is not for softies, she would sigh.

It was another small loss on the growing list - eyes fade and reading is a challenge; the garden she loved became too much to work.

Only the small birds bore witness to her - an old woman with a walking stick, picking her way past lavender bushes, wild roses, a blousy camellia, the white stars of the magnolia stellata.

But in her prime, how she could write a letter - how the words sang, how beautiful and fluent the pen on page... dipping and moving.

She used to spend hours on the phone chatting to her friends and as she did so, she doodled her signature on a note pad, sketched leaves everywhere, twisting and twining.

I copied her - invested in a fountain pen and practised my signature.

On the inside covers of my old school books, I'd write: "If this book should dare to roam, box its ears and send it home."

I'd write: Latin is a dead language, dead as dead can be; first it killed the Romans, now it's killing me.

I'd write a signature with a lot of swirls and practise it again and again; Freud would have had a field day.

But it wasn't always so. Writing and spelling did not come that easily. In the early years of primary school, my bs and ds were forever the wrong way around; I tended to write 'gril' for girl... much to my shame.

And then along came the typewriter and a course in touch typing - you learn on a blank keyboard so there's no point looking at your fingers.

Shorthand followed. It was an essential skill for a journalist in the days before mobile phones and dinky recorders.

But my hand writing suffered. The words crawled like money spiders across the page and even the man who loves me most in the world could never decipher exactly what I had written on a card.

I've lost the skill.

Someone reminded me that I used to do calligraphy and was the go-to for wedding invitations.

Brothers, sisters, friends benefited 20 years ago.

Now, hand writing seems like such an effort. I'm rusty as hell.

Nevertheless, I'm investing in a bundle of Christmas cards.

When the Post Office man told me the cost of a single stamp, I baulked.

But give me my father's trusty pen and a bottle of indigo blue ink.

Perhaps some traditions - like handwritten cards - are worth saving.