Rediscovered

Hello all, thank you for your lovely comments on my last post. I love to read your thoughts and do appreciate the time you take out of your busy lives to leave a comment. I means a lot.

I'm going to share with you my rediscovery of something which I used to enjoy very much - writing. Not just composing words into meaning, but the act of writing itself, literally the putting of pen to paper. When I was a teenager I enjoyed copying out poetry and made my own anthologies. This was pre-internet, of course, so I had to borrow books from the library to copy from. My school projects were painstakingly neat and tidy, and I took great pride in their presentation, as you can see. This made me smile - my 13 year-old self decided to do fancy medieval-style titles for my Chaucer project. I wrote very small in those days.



Aged 17 my writing had become even smaller, and had lost its slant.

After that I did a degree in English and had to take copious notes, as well as write very long essays by hand (unthinkable nowadays) and neatness had to give way to speed.



As I moved into the world of work in an office job, I was processing lots of paperwork. No time there for fancy scripts. There followed many years of at-home child-rearing in which hand-writing was confined to shopping lists and the odd letter. Now that I work in a school, oddly enough my writing has become even more scrawly as I constantly try to catch up with myself, and I've often looked at it and sighed. 

Now I know that in the scale of things having neat writing is not wildly important, but it was something that I used to really enjoy. Having read blogs like Emma's in which she talks about the pleasure of letter-writing, I felt inspired to dig out my old fountain-pen and have a go at neatening things up.

Out came my favourite notebooks, so often unused due to my feeling that what I put in them needs to look as good as their exteriors (is it just me or do you ever feel like that too?).

I used to write with purple ink cartridges, but couldn't find any in my local stationery shops so started to investigate on-line. There I discovered J Herbin natural inks, and I almost swooned with delight. All those delicious colours, and with wonderful names like Gris Nuage (Cloud Grey), Poussiere de Lune (Moon Dust) and Larmes de Cassis (Blackcurrant Tears). I succumbed to a tube of Violette Pensee (Pensive Violet), a gorgeous shade of purple. I also found a mixed bag of pink, purple and turquoise cartridges in a bigger stationer's nearby. I was ready to go.

I must say that the habit of writing in a rush is a hard one to break and years of hurrying compels me to write speedily, making many mistakes as I go. However, I have talked a good deal about mindfulness in previous posts, and determined to slow down and take pleasure in drawing the ink across the page, forming the curves and straight lines of the letters, exhaling as I go, and just going with the process. and trying not to mind if I make a mistake. I've been copying out odd verses of my favourite poems and extracts from novels.





 I like to add little twirls and doodles as I gain confidence,

Having got the bug, I also bought these two calligraphy pens from an art shop. 

One is black,

 and the other 'hyacinth'. I think purple ink is still my favourite.

 Handwriting is such a personal thing, like a fingerprint, individual to each of us. I'm not bothered about being prescriptive about the rules of handwriting. Rather I like to see how my letters form themselves, an antidote to speedily tapping away on a keyboard. I once looked at the original manuscripts of writers' work in the British Library and was intrigued by their differing styles. There are often lots of scrawly crossings out on the pages, showing their mental processes as they wrote. This book is full of photos of the letter-writers' original letters, and it's fascinating for that very reason.

In my everyday life, of course, it's not practical to write slowly and deliberately, but I'm hoping that some of my rediscovered handwriting skills will rub off.