Handwriting

When was the last time you received in the post a handwritten letter from another person? Or when did you last write a handwritten letter to anyone else? With the advent of digital communication, emails, texts, electronic messages etc, there is now little need or requirement to do so.I do receive one handwritten letter about 4 times a year. This is from a friend who is a Luddite and refuses to have the internet or engage in any form of digital communication. He is also fairly deaf, so speaking via a landline is tricky. His only means of regular communication with me, therefore, is to hand write a letter. I respond by mail, but always type mine, as my handwriting is not the easiest to read.Will handwriting thus become a thing of the past, if it hasn’t done already?  I hear via teacher relatives and friends and have seen from my own involvement in schools over the years, that some children find it far easier to use their fingers and thumbs to handle and control electronic devices than they do to use a pen or a pencil.If handwriting is uncommon today, then obviously in the past, it was the main way of communication. I buy and sell antiquarian books and I love thumbing through books and seeing inside different notes and writings from people. It can be a shopping list, a diary piece, a love note, a comment on the book, or just someone’s thoughts on life or their day.
The writing is often beautifully crafted and neatly expressed. Handwriting in years past was an art in itself, with copperplate style and pen and ink.Handwriting can have more personal or sentimental links too.  In our family, we do not have  many photographs and so written memories are very important reminders of who a person was. I have a diary of a relative’s journey through the Lake District in the early 1900’s, which makes fascinating reading and gives a thoughtful insight into their lives at that time.The main memory I have of my father is due to his handwritten talks and notes that he left and to which I sometimes refer when I give talks of my own, or when I am drawn to thinking about him.Handwriting has and always will have an important place in my life, but I wonder what place it has in yours and whether it will have any place in future generations?In honour of the theme of writing I am including a favorite poem by Seamus Heaney:

Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Thank you for reading, David. Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook