Handwriting.
Mine is top-notch; Dearest's looks as though he was injected with squid ink at birth. Mine is good enough to be asked to write wedding invitations: once. You only have to write
Mr and Mrs Grabitass for Mr and Mrs Gabbitas and word gets round.
Handwriting defines us in many ways. Or at least it used to. Years ago when you applied for a job it had to be handwritten. In those days we were all amateur graphologists deducing what we could from a person's handwriting... Sloping forward good; sloping backwards ? Whoah.. not so good. Never knew exactly why, was just told from an early age that this was not a good look.
When I say I've got decent handwriting. I say this without any semblance of false modesty, because I have had many years of studying handwriting which has given me many points of comparison. I am the product of two parents who had good handwriting skills and a 50s/60s education where handwriting was taught by teachers who had been properly taught themselves. I believe these to be significant factors.
Handwriting as an art form went out the window with the advent of progressive education which also devalued the need for correct spelling, punctuation and grandma.(Just checking you're still with me?)
As typing takes over from handwriting, penmanship will eventually achieve historic status.
Sorry, too much Gravitarse.
Dearest finds lists incredibly helpful. When asked to compose a list of useful information recently (A Doomsday list) he said he could write it on the back of a fag packet. Which only goes to show how entrenched is motor memory in that he gave up smoking thirty five years ago.
I on the other hand, find lists pretty useless. Shopping lists in particular never find their way into my bag; they habitually remain on the dining room table but they magically serve to marshall my thoughts in the supermarket.
I used to keep a day book when I worked for the BBC as an Assistant Floor Manager in Drama: that was full of prop lists; but in the real world I have never resorted to them. This is not smugness, or a reflection of my superb internal organisation, it's just that a Post-it note is sufficient. On every available flat surface. And a few vertical ones, just in case.
Today I read about an exhibition by Alice Instone, an artist who has taken more than a special interest in the to-do lists written by women. She has apparently scanned the lists and blown them up to display on walls, and on furniture. Conceptually, she is interested in the content of those lists, but artistically, I imagine, it will be the handwriting that that gives them an entity.
Am I interested in other peoples's lists? Not in the slightest.. in this exhibition there was a list of contributors I'd never heard of, apart from one Cherie Blair. Now apparently she keeps hers in her head. (Similarities between me and Cherie end there) And who knows what goes on in that over- active mind of hers?
Lovely story emerged yesterday that Admiral Alan West, First Sea Lord, was miffed that during his four year tenure he was not once invited to Downing Street when the Blairs were in residence. His moment came however, when Cherie Blair asked if she could personally
launch a ship. (Like you do..) He agreed to her launching the 12th of the Type-45 destroyers commissioned by her husband. What he didn't tell her was that the number of ships had been cut to eight.
Don't you love it when vaulting ambition, HMS Hubris is sunk without trace?
Bet her handwriting is leaning forward, probably near horizontal...
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