Hey, hey! It’s been so long since I have written with a pen,
its sharper than a razor, I don’t feel like Errol Flynn.
Got no computer, I can’t type the letter ‘M’.
You’re not responding right, I guess I better start again.
– ‘Last cigarette’ by Dramarama
At some point when I was growing up, it was impressed upon me by someone, I do not remember who or even when, that good handwriting was something that mattered. I don’t mean mattered just to them, but that it was something that was one of the multiplicity of ways a person could be judged, much in the same way a person could be judged by how they dressed or their smell or the manner in which they spoke. By this I do not mean the shop from which their clothes came, or what sort of aftershave they used or the specific meaning of what a person said. No, I mean were there clothes unkept, clean, carelessly worn, well fitted, did they smell unwashed or was aftershave used to mask rather than attend natural odors, were words carelessly and crudely strung together or well chosen and rich.
Clearly handwriting was another one of those ‘things-that-matter’. So I attended to it, studied calligraphy, adopted formal, social and casual hands, did a wicked gothic black letter and a distinctive cursive italic… and the years slid by.
Then tonight I found myself rummaging through one of several teetering piles of music CD’s I have not listened to for quite a while and popped on ‘Dramarama’, a reasonable but essentially unremarkable late 1980’s band and heard the song quoted above.
And it was true. In spite of churning out thousands of words a day for business and pleasure I have not written anything with a pen for more than two weeks by my best guess. And what I wrote then was a scrawled supermarket shopping list on the back of a page of last year’s The Far Side daily calender.
So does ones handwriting really say anything significant about you in this digital age? Well last year an old chum of mine got married again and asked me to do her invitations by hand, just like I did 12 years ago the last time she got married. I told her I was very out of practice and that she should get them printed but she insisted in that way she knows I cannot refuse. So I suppose she certainly thought it was ‘something that mattered’. Fortunately she provided a vast number of spare invitations as it seems that formal handwriting is most certainly not like riding a bike. It took me several days of concerted effort to dredge up that unused skill before I was producing hand lettered invitations to what I felt was an acceptable standard.
So what does it actually mean? Well there was a time when I would probably have thought a bit less of a person with ghastly handwriting. It was almost as if when handed a hard to read scribble that that person was being presumptuous and disrespectful, forcing me to try and decode it rather than making themselves clear. It was rather like someone who does not deign to look at you whilst addressing you.
But times do change. Although it might still irritate, I do not really accord quite so much stock to the quality of a person’s written hand. In this age of print-outs and IR networks there are people I know very well indeed and yet have probably never even seen what their handwriting looks like.
Perhaps it still is important, just not in quite the same nuanced way it once was. Still, I do hope my friends marriage proves more durable than the last one as I do not look forward to doing her invitations for a third time.
