Monday 18 January 2010

The keyboard and the pen

When I was a teenager, I discovered something amazing. A pen that made writing fun, desirable, and (almost) exciting. A Pilot V5. They never lasted long, but maybe that was because I'd actually write stuff with them. Time moved on, and I grew a penchant for nice Parker pens (Frontier rollerball please...), except that I'd get one for Christmas and have lost it by my birthday only a month later, and need another one. Anyways... Moving on more than a few years, I've come to realise that having something which makes writing attractive is more than just a nice incidental thing, but an important consideration.

At least for me, writing is a major way of organising and clarifying my thoughts, and I quite enjoy writing random streams of consciousness on a subject and later reviewing it to see if any interesting things are in there. If writing is fun, I'll do more of it, and having a decent writing instrument does make it fun.

Nowadays, I don't use a pen much (and my handwriting seems to be getting worse from lack of practice), but I still use a writing instrument - my keyboard. And just as there is a great difference between a free biro and a decent pen, so there is with keyboards, if not more so. A decent keyboard makes 'writing' fun, and that is a good thing. My current choice is a small Apple keyboard which is nice and portable, so I can plug it into whichever computer I happen to be using (it's even worth the annoyance of not having a delete key on a PC), and enjoy fine typing, perhaps even leading to some fine thoughts...