preliminary thoughts insincerity scrawled on a serviette
Yesterday a BBC article posited the influences contributing to the ‘slow death’ of handwriting.
A gradual metamorphosis, not necessarily death. Scrawl and scribble can convey a message without well formed, legible words, as many a toddlers parent and their fridge postings will attest. That a message is penned is a message of significance in itself. The significance may change with time, but it will remain significant. Keys on boards can convey a clear and consistent letter form reducing the variety of messages conveyed by the personal and environmental quirks of pen-personship. My own left-handed scrawl gets worse in cold weather and when I get a tad over-excited, these things are not conveyed by the clear system of key-strokes. Pen or keys will always imply different messages and the messages with change with time. Just as the messages of ’hand made’ and ‘factory made’ have changed from the initial high value associated with the consistent quality of factory made to the subsequent high value associated with the craft-skill required for hand made.
The art of pen wielding will be maintained by people who take the care to love and use and explore it well, and I may shift from these keys to further pen a wobbly thing or two for your merry bemusement and befuddlement. Consider yourselves warned.
March 15th 1984
It will take several months to read the varied scrawl of miss-spelt ramblings in my early diaries. Mumzie recently discovered these diaries in a dark corner of her home. The diaries stop in 1984 when I switched to letter writing…
A second sheet was added to this 1984 entry during my first year at University. The day went something like this:
A morning of contemplating whether a fascinating but somewhat screwed-up boy should have the benefit of my influence in his life.
An afternoon sketching portraits of 2 handsome boys while they supplied me with lots of tea. The tea taking isn’t explicitly mentioned because it is understood as a part of the ‘spending an afternoon with a handsome fellow’ process. The boys had the afrontary to keep the sketches. Sadly, I don’t actually have copies of any of the portraits I used to produce. I was fairly prolific with my sketch-book as well as in my diaries.
The evening involved drinking ‘side cars’ in a disco and helping a girl-friend disrupt the dancefloor during some of those slow girl-boy cuddling dances by jumping around between the soppy-people.
A fabulous day indeed.
1990
While searching my drawers for material to take to this diary reading event I rediscovered way too much ‘poetry’, uhum. Below is a piece inspired by Swampthang, presented in original scrawl. To read it you need to
START SQUINTING NOW:
Judging by the uneven scrawl it could have been written on a #11 bus.
This was scrawled directly onto a PC screen with a pen! I ‘borrowed’ the Tablet PC from a friend at work. I had to tear it from his arms leaving him trembling in the corridor as I ran clutching my prize and laughing maniacally. WOW (Wendy One Wants)… …oh, geekiness abounds… …that’s like ‘sploginess abounds’ without music or being stuck in the 1980′s:
aren’t you glad you can read my typed, rather than scrawled, miss-spellings 
