People say lots of things about me. Different things. I just know they do. But one thing everybody seems to agree on is that I have truly God-Awful handwriting.
Back in the good old days of sending faxes (all right, so maybe I still do, sometimes), I would scribble out a quick note and bash it off. A few minutes later, the recipient would invariably phone up and say, “I got that fax of yours just then… can you read it out for me please?”
This wasn’t always the case. My ‘starting secondary school’ joined-up writing was actually quite neat and small and spidery. I used to average fourteen words to the line and hard-pressed teachers used to plead with me to write a bit bigger. Granted, I always had that left-handed problem of dragging my little finger over what I had just written and thus tending to smudge a bit. But that was no big deal – the worst effect was that I would always have a blue stain on the outside knuckle of my left pinkie. There are worse things in the world.
Back in the good old days of sending faxes (all right, so maybe I still do, sometimes), I would scribble out a quick note and bash it off. A few minutes later, the recipient would invariably phone up and say, “I got that fax of yours just then… can you read it out for me please?”
This wasn’t always the case. My ‘starting secondary school’ joined-up writing was actually quite neat and small and spidery. I used to average fourteen words to the line and hard-pressed teachers used to plead with me to write a bit bigger. Granted, I always had that left-handed problem of dragging my little finger over what I had just written and thus tending to smudge a bit. But that was no big deal – the worst effect was that I would always have a blue stain on the outside knuckle of my left pinkie. There are worse things in the world.
It all went wrong when I started Technical Drawing in school. There was a requirement to be able to write things in neat precise block capitals and I took to this quite well. Unfortunately, this block capital usage started to seep into my normal everyday writing too. Couple this with the fact that I write very fast and that was it. Over the years, my handwriting has become a rubbish amalgam of block capitals and joined up writing which most normal people have great difficulty in deciphering.
Mostly, like everyone else now, I tend to type stuff out so handwriting is no longer the huge issue it used to be. But if I am required to fill in a form or something, I have to settle down and really focus on producing something presentable. I can so it but, my gosh, it requires concentration.
Sometimes, if I have what I reckon is a good idea, I write it down. I do it really quickly in case I get bored before I’m finished and then, as often as not, I forget entirely about it. For this reason, I can often be seen scowling into my wee notebook as if it is the bloody Rosetta Stone or something. Even I can’t read my own writing sometimes.
The most interesting question which emerges from the post, for me anyway, is why should I bother telling you this? Who wants to know, who cares? I wonder about that too. What the hell am I playing at? Well, trying to answer, at one level it’s writing practice. It keeps my mind turning over phraseology and how best a story might be told. This has been useful to me, down my blogging years. More oddly, perhaps, is a notion I picked up from a comment on a post some years ago. It is that a blog like this can almost become a sort of a jigsaw puzzle of the person writing it. If there lies even a modicum of truth within each post then the three-hundred-or-so posts that are now here might build to a picture of the person. In years to come, someone might look them over and feel they know me better than they did before. Hell, in years to come, I might look them over myself and know more…
Anyway, I’ve told you now – I have bad handwriting – it’s another piece in the puzzle.
I scribbled something out for a lady once, not realising that she was a professional handwriting analyst. She became quite agitated and, in truth, a bit over-excited. I think she reckoned that she had finally found the Holy Grail of Mad Handwriting and I could see in her eyes that she had every intention of locking me up in a cage and feeding me scraps of things to copy out for her. I managed to make my escape just as she began to explain to me what all my scriptural foibles and eccentricities actually meant. I really don’t want to know, thanks all the same.
As I vanished over the horizon, she did shout after me that I had a decidedly Red Aura.
So that’s good I guess…
… isn’t it??
Mostly, like everyone else now, I tend to type stuff out so handwriting is no longer the huge issue it used to be. But if I am required to fill in a form or something, I have to settle down and really focus on producing something presentable. I can so it but, my gosh, it requires concentration.
Sometimes, if I have what I reckon is a good idea, I write it down. I do it really quickly in case I get bored before I’m finished and then, as often as not, I forget entirely about it. For this reason, I can often be seen scowling into my wee notebook as if it is the bloody Rosetta Stone or something. Even I can’t read my own writing sometimes.
The most interesting question which emerges from the post, for me anyway, is why should I bother telling you this? Who wants to know, who cares? I wonder about that too. What the hell am I playing at? Well, trying to answer, at one level it’s writing practice. It keeps my mind turning over phraseology and how best a story might be told. This has been useful to me, down my blogging years. More oddly, perhaps, is a notion I picked up from a comment on a post some years ago. It is that a blog like this can almost become a sort of a jigsaw puzzle of the person writing it. If there lies even a modicum of truth within each post then the three-hundred-or-so posts that are now here might build to a picture of the person. In years to come, someone might look them over and feel they know me better than they did before. Hell, in years to come, I might look them over myself and know more…
Anyway, I’ve told you now – I have bad handwriting – it’s another piece in the puzzle.
I scribbled something out for a lady once, not realising that she was a professional handwriting analyst. She became quite agitated and, in truth, a bit over-excited. I think she reckoned that she had finally found the Holy Grail of Mad Handwriting and I could see in her eyes that she had every intention of locking me up in a cage and feeding me scraps of things to copy out for her. I managed to make my escape just as she began to explain to me what all my scriptural foibles and eccentricities actually meant. I really don’t want to know, thanks all the same.
As I vanished over the horizon, she did shout after me that I had a decidedly Red Aura.
So that’s good I guess…
… isn’t it??