Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist)

There are so many lost arts such as building dry rock walls that have been lost or almost lost to society. I have a friend who is a dry rock wall builder having done his apprenticeship in the UK. There are not that many walls of this type left in existence and almost none currently being constructed so he is working as a builder, his skill virtually lost to the world.

Another art that has been largely lost is writing. I don’t mean writing as in telling a story, journalistic pieces and the like which are now  computer generated. No I mean the art of using a pen. When I started school we used lead pencils as the teachers considered  us too small and inexperienced to manage nib and ink. When we had learnt the correct method of holding the pencil, a skill I never mastered and to this day place two fingers along the shaft, we progressed to the fountain pen. This did not feature for long in my school life as it was soon replaced by the BIC biro, the only available ball point pen in the country town in which I lived.

We wrote everything. Diaries, journals, address books, autograph books, doodling pads, scribble pads, letters, notes, manuscripts, account books, ledgers, invoices, receipts – you name it, it was written with a pen.

The pen itself became a status symbol. A Parker fountain pen was the most prized possession but other ball point pens , such as the paper mate, became sort after. The pen had an emotional side to it – the flow and the silkiness of the ink, the feel of the shaft in your hand all made a difference to the amount of enjoyment you gained from the writing process.

Now I can barely write. I can still hold the pen in my odd fashion but the movement on the paper is inept, inexperienced. My writing is difficult to read. I attempt to write as fast as I can type with the resultant writing illegible. I write next to nothing these days and this lack of practice shows when I do attempt to perform the lost art. I do notes on my phone or the computer. Spreadsheets have replaced account books. Word processing has replaced pieces of paper. Emails have supplanted letters; cheques replaced by online banking. Address books replaced by computer versions. The only thing that I write these days is the odd card and these too are being replaced by e cards and the like.

I don’t think this is happening to only me. In fact I know it isn’t as they are talking of decreasing postal delivery services from weekly to only a couple of times a week. Most bills are sent via the net and with people no longer writing letters the postie has little in his bag to deliver.

My nephews from an early age were computerised as  a requirement of their schools. Even my nieces many years before the boys were thought of had to choose between a computer stream for lessons or standard writing. They both chose computer but in those days this was innovative, nowadays commonplace.

There is an element of danger in this trend. They’ve covered the possibility of your own personal computer or phone malfunction by the development of the cloud. What will happen though if we lose power and not just in a temporary fashion. We would be stymied. An entire life could be lost and with the lost art of writing it will make it difficult to start again from scratch.

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