As you may have guessed from the picture at the top of this post – I use a pen. It’s a Parker fountain pen that I have had for 15 years or so. I love this pen and couldn’t do my writing without it.

My hand writing is neater with it (it’s a doctors scrawl with anything else), I can write faster than I can type with it (I touch type btw), and yet even being a lefty I don’t smudge the ink (I do however write at 90degrees to what everyone else does! Top to bottom, paper tuned – I may have to YouTube that).

The biggest thing is the release, I just don’t seem to be able to flow when typing, something will distract me (the wiggly red lines are the biggest thing), that will kill the flow mid word.

That and my laptop is permanently connected to the internet and we all know how dangerous that is to productivity!

What really gets me is that no one ever writes letters any more, I get emails from my friends, I admit that I tend to email things most of the time too, but sometimes, some things, there is a need for a proper hand written letter, sent by the good old Royal Mail (ok – it may never arrive via the RM – but that’s a different thing altogether).

Try it – instead of telling a friend about something via email (or Facebook), write a letter, and post it (or even hand it to them), something special will happen. And I just got the attack of the wiggly red lines!

You may even get something back. One thing that will happen – they will take more care over reading it than the 10th Facebook update of the day – lost amongst the 100 or so other updates that appears on the timeline.

It may be the ocd in me – but I tend to keep a letter too, but emails, status updates etc. just get lost or deleted.

So – if I ever give you a hand written letter think nothing more of it than I value your friendship enough to tell you something important.