* Alternatively, he might have been a foreign spy. In the Alberto Cavalcanti film Went the Day Well?, the innocent English villagers first suspect that the platoon foisted on them may actually be German Nazis when they notice that their notes on a poker game cross the 7’s.
* Often these are termed ‘Greek E’s’ – the ones with a crescent-shaped back – but uncial is a more accurate source. Uncial is the term for the rounded calligraphy characteristic of early mediaeval monasteries (see Chapter 7).
† There may be men in the world with a heart-shaped jot, as the dot over the i is called, but I have yet to meet one, or run a mile from them, rather.
* You remove the plug and ink reservoir, then apply the mouth to the writing end with the spit ball at the plug end, but you know that already.
* The familiar QWERTY arrangement of the keyboard was chosen not for its efficiency, but the opposite. The first users of the typewriter needed an arrangement which would slow users down so that the levers would not jam.
* Marx, who saw and foresaw most things, outdoes himself by remarking that the history of civilization is entirely down to human beings possessing opposable thumbs. It was impressive to guess that sooner or later men would invent a way of writing that required only the movement of the thumbs.
† But how will it know whether you’re shouting at it or at your annoying little brother?
* Who, I warn you, might say she regards handwriting and grammar as lost arts, but evidently knows eff-all about the dangling modifier.
* Here’s a thing. You’re driving down an Indiana track when out of nowhere comes a tractor into the side of your Subaru. How do you exchange details? Neither of you have ever been able to write anything but your own names. The farmhand don’t be holding with them thar smart phones nor with that new-fangled Internet. (Or he does, but the battery on your smartphone has died a death – take your pick of disastrous scenarios). So there the two of you stand, helpless, in an Indiana field, trying to work out which way up to hold a pen and cursing the idiotic name of Dr Scott Hamilton who landed you in this mess.
* ‘What does emeritus mean, Rupert?’ Frank Giles asked Rupert Murdoch after being turned into Editor Emeritus of The Times after one egregious catastrophe under his editorial stewardship. ‘It’s Latin, Frank,’ the proprietor said. ‘The e- means you’re out. The meritus means you deserve it.’
* Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble, p. 71. There’s a photograph of the seven-foot monolith there, if you can face it.
* These restrictions went on much longer than you might think. My sister, born in 1962, was subjected to deportment classes at a Kingston-upon-Thames grammar school in 1973–4 which required her to walk around a room with a book on her head – she won a prize for it, indeed.
* Definition: a ‘looped’ alphabet would return along a different path in the upper portions, or ascenders, of the lower-case letters b, d, h, k, l, t, and the lower portions, or descenders, of the letters g, j, p, q, y, and both ascenders and descenders of the letter f, thus forming an enclosed loop. An unlooped letter will either return along the same path, forming a line, or will just go one way.
† Dresden.
* Sometimes. The DA was quite big among the bolder sort of lesbian in Notting Hill clubs, I’m reliably informed.
* Queen Victoria detested him, partly because he once burst into the bedroom of one of her ladies-in-waiting in the unfulfilled hope of seducing the poor girl.
† Palmerston must be classed with Churchill as the only two prime ministers with any gift at all for metaphor – Churchill, who once described the meeting of minds on the appointment of a particularly saturnine individual to the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer as resembling the joyous reunion of two long-separated kindred lizards.
* Had people heard of him already by then? Or was Palmer just the sort of man who would always include his name in the title of his first book? My dad used to play the French horn in a wind band called the Lucas Wind Ensemble, named after the conductor, a man named Lucas, who was well-known for having named his own wind ensemble after himself, a man, as I say, called Lucas.
* In rather a different area, the aging Henry James gave up handwriting altogether, and took to dictating his novels – a shift in efficiency which enabled him to write his last three novels, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, in successive years, 1902, 1903, 1904. We don’t think of Henry James as an epitome of speed, rather as H.G. Wells’s caricature in Boon, an elephant struggling to pick up a pea with his forelegs, but the feat of writing the three most involved novels in the language so rapidly surely stands with the internal combustion engine and the Wright Brothers’ invention as a sign of the period’s devotion to efficient speed. James scholars disagree about the moment when he took to dictation, but most people think it was at some point during What Maisie Knew – the madder sort of Jamesian will identify the exact chapter for you on stylistic grounds.
* A derivative of Palmer’s methods.
* By ‘finals’ the author means those elaborate flourishes which, even in Palmer, conclude a word with a little kick in the air, to no very obvious purpose. It’s striking that many efficient writers in Palmer cursive have a decided tendency to link one word to the next, encouraged by these elaborate finals.
* At least as old as Swift’s amusing but rather offensive comment in Gulliver’s Travels about the writing of the Lilliputians: ‘Their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans; nor from the right to the left like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in England.’ (Gulliver’s Travels, Book 1, Chapter 6.)
* That was probably what happened to the style propagated by Bickham in the end – elaborate pen fantasies, indulged to impress credulous parents by terrible schools.
* But who, in the whole of the nineteenth century, ever made their o round? It is always an elongated leaning egg-shape.
* The report is wincingly titled ‘Une Question de Writing?’ A research project commissioned by the Teacher Training Agency.
* This is not just a French principle. I heard of a lady called Liora Laufer who has set up an exercise class in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, called ‘callirobics’. ‘The word combines calligraphy and aerobics … the idea is to improve handwriting skills by using a series of repetitive hand movements set to music. We have programs for ages 4 through 80.’ It makes me want to buy a leotard.
* What do you mean, why does a u or a double n have a line above it at all? And what do you mean, what happens when the u with a line above it also needs an umlaut above it?
* I am sorry to say that when I said the words ‘Iserlohner Schreibkreis’ to an educated German friend to ask his opinion of this important moment in postwar German history, he immediately burst out laughing, which just goes to show that it is perfectly possible to get too close to one’s subject.
* An impressive delay, given that since 1968, Germany has been simply stuffed with people insisting on their right to insult all forms of authority and, in extreme cases, put a bomb underneath it for no very obvious reason. I know quite a lot of people from Berlin days who regard any form of housework as kleinbürgerlich in the extreme – one dear old friend confided in me that he thought only pathetically materialistic people ever cleaned their bathrooms, though he admitted that he had, in ten years, cleaned his lavatory three times. Quite a lot of them made a point of addressing their best friends as ‘arschloch’, which means ‘arsehole’, as a clean break from bourgeois conventions. It is odd that they seem not to have succeeded in making a serious dent on national models of handwriting until the other day.
* Wittgenstein and Hitler were the same age, but as Wittgenstein was advanced a year and Hitler held back, they were two classes apart, and no one knows if they ever really encountered each other.
* One of the amiable things about the home-weave, hand-carpentry, pottage-and-pottery movement of this time is that some of them decided that Latin words were no good and not homespun enough, and ought to be replaced where possible with Anglo-Saxon invented equivalents. The most amusing of these individuals was the enchanting Australian composer Percy Grainger, who put a good deal of effort extirpating any taint of Italian instruction from his scores, replacing, for instance, ‘Crescendo molto’ with ‘Louden Lots’.
* Brother of Anthony, the expert on Poussin and traitor. Not Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, an independently fascinating person of rather an earlier date, who as far as I know had nothing to say about handwriting.
† Sir Howard has a great collection of Indian painting, which was exhibited as a whole for the first time in spring 2012 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
* This is what the witness said. However, he must have left school in 1950, so I think the ballpoint may in fact have arrived in his life a year or two after that.
* The witness means Gourdie. He gave me a second-hand copy of Gourdie’s book as a Christmas present the day before I recorded this conversation.
* Just how big was that mirror? Salinger tells us that the author of this message had ‘minute handwriting’, but had the author ever tried to write anything on a mirror with soap? There is a size of writing below which soap on glass just will not go. The story is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.
* English festival on 5 November. Celebrates the occasion when a Roman Catholic called Guy Fawkes failed to blow up parliament, by burning him in effigy, in mild disgust, and letting off a lot of bangers.
† The painters were Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. The story comes, unexpectedly, from Stravinsky’s brilliantly funny conversations with Robert Craft.
* This is nothing to do with anything, but searching for narratives about handwriting and food, I discovered a gloriously mad blog about how you can improve your handwriting by changing your diet. ‘The treatment I gave Jayson was ridiculously simple. Before even getting his tests back, I knew that he needed to be put on an elimination diet. That meant getting rid of the most common food allergens – dairy, gluten, eggs, and yeast. I also had him get off junk foods and sugar and eat real, whole food. I treated his yeast problem with an antifungal medication for one month. I gave him a daily multivitamin, and supplemental zinc, magnesium, and fish oil, as well as acidophilus to improve his gut and immune system. By getting rid of the things that were keeping him out of balance (food allergies and yeast) and by giving his body the things it needed to function and thrive (good food, fish oil, zinc, magnesium, and healthy bacteria for the gut) Jayson was able to recover his health. Two months later, Jayson returned to my office a new and happy boy. And remarkably, his writing went from illegible to perfect.’
* Smith is worth our attention. One of the British Museum’s first keepers, he spent most of his life sucking up to the notoriously miserly sculptor Nollekens the Younger in the hope of a massive bequest at his death. When Nollekens died, he left Smith all of £50 out of an estate of £200,000. Smith spent years subsequently writing a viciously offensive biography of Nollekens in revenge. Nollekens and His Times contains, among other things, a deathless scene in which Nollekens and his equally awful wife ask ten people to dinner and serve them two mackerel and a plate of mashed turnip, half an inch deep.
* Still do. In May 2012, a reader of the Daily Telegraph, a Mr Robin Chapman, wrote to the paper to contribute to a discussion about the ongoing survival of fountain pens to say, ‘I use a quill; always have done, always will. Those from a peacock’s wing feather are both sturdy and well balanced, and in plentiful supply about my garden.’
* A note about writing in coloured inks. There are strange prejudices at work here which ought not to bear much examination, but seem more or less insuperable. The colours of inks have proper associations, and proper standing in the world, not limited to inks used for writing. I was deeply, inexplicably shocked the first time I saw one of Joseph Beuys’s drawings executed in blue ballpoint pen – the medium and the colour clearly and unarguably limited to doodling in a meeting, not for something to be exhibited in a gallery. Not for the first time, but very economically, Beuys is messing with you with this one.
I’m not quite convinced about writing with blue ink, either. It is cosy and friendly, but perhaps not very serious – I wouldn’t mind it from a friend on a postcard, but I think if I saw a student essay written in it, I would have to make an effort not to deduct three or four points absent-mindedly. Black, or blue-black is the neutral choice. You’re allowed to make marginalia, and to comment rebarbatively, in red, but you wouldn’t write a letter in the stuff, surely?
Beyond that, we are really into exotic and faintly frightening territory. I had heard the phrase ‘green-ink letter’ before I started work in the public service in 1990, but I didn’t realize it was literally true that eccentrics despatched letters to authority in emerald shades. One gentleman used to write to us weekly – I was working as a clerk on the House of Commons’s Energy Select Committee at the time – in green. His complaint was that he lived on the borders of Scotland, on the English side, and had discovered that his electricity was being supplied by Scottish generators. As a patriot, he objected to his kettle and lights being powered by Scottish electricity. Moreover, he went on to explain, he was strongly of the opinion that the Scottish electricity companies were using the opportunity to influence his thoughts and indeed alter his personality for the worse, and he was already finding himself saying ‘McTavish, the noo’ on unexpected occasions. Could we, as the ENGLISH parliament, take up his cause?
A reply went out, wearily, weekly, regretting that the committee could take no action regarding this situation, and signed by the most junior member of staff, i.e. me, in black ink.
The Prince of Wales is said to send out long letters to government ministers debating policy, written in purple ink. Whether we can draw any conclusions from the sorts of people who use eccentric inks to write letters with is unclear, but I can’t resist sharing this lovely paragraph from Piggott’s Survey. After receiving 25,000 samples of handwriting, he analysed them according to the colour of ink used – as well as many other factors – and concluded that they could be assigned as follows. ‘I find generally that blue is favoured by the ladies whilst the men prefer the non-committal blue-black. The majority of those using black were artists, architects, university lecturers, R.C. priests, students, and upper-form grammar-school boys. Brown ink was used in the ratio of 1:1,600 chiefly by typographers; violet ink, 1:4,500 by ballet dancers and entertainers; and green by lady novelists (1:1,950).’ I have more than a few lady novelists among my acquaintance, and I am pretty sure that none of them ever write a word in green ink. When did this interesting tendency, if it ever was a tendency, die out, to be handed on exclusively to total loonies?
Mr Piggott goes on to complain about ‘names almost household words’ writing to him in ‘combinations of red ink on bright blue paper, green ink on brilliant yellow paper and blue ink on blue paper of almost, but not quite, the same shade’, but I think those people must have been having the poor man on.
* Her DNB entry doesn’t mention her handwriting project at all.
* This is what distinguishes Richardson from Maria Montessori, whose ideas were transforming education across Europe. Montessori, too, believed firmly in the child directing the pace of his own education, and had all sorts of ingenious ideas about how to introduce children to letters – famously, she would let them handle letters made out of sandpaper to impress the shape on their hands. Her letterforms, however, are very curious. They maintain some elaborate loops on the ascenders and descenders, but, weirdly, don’t use the loops for the purposes of joining up the letters. I guess the intention was that children could make the loop and then, at some later point, would find it easier to join letters up – the leap from print to cursive would be much less in the Montessori models. The cost, however, is that children start to write with an obviously and completely irrational style of writing.
* This is cheating. I once read it in a ‘How to Graphologize Yourself and Others’ popular guide. I can’t remember anything else from the book, but I remember this, largely because my g’s gape like a yawning whale, and I am, indeed, pathologically incapable of keeping a secret if it’s remotely interesting. At the time, an interesting question arose, which I still haven’t had an answer to: if I took to closing my g’s scrupulously, would I start to be able to keep other people’s secrets?
† A terrifying example here is the last letter written by one of the 11 September hijackers to his girlfriend, reproduced in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day, p. 350. Ziad Jarrah has no idea at all which way his letters might slope, and where he might want to join them up. Plenty of people have handwriting like this and don’t go on to do anything very bad at all, but anyone looking at Jarrah’s handwriting would have realized how unstable and insecure he was.
* Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, often seems to regard the personality as something to be suppressed under a facade of gentlemanly behaviour – standing correctly, speaking correctly, and indeed writing correctly, just as other gentlemen do. A particular low point is his suggestion that it is frightfully common to laugh.
† Doe vs Suckamore. The judge was Coleridge’s nephew.
* The reader may wonder what the difference between ‘regularity’ and ‘rhythm’ is. This writer assigns to ‘regularity’ things like the size of small letters, the angle of writing and the distance between downstrokes, which, if constant, can term the writing ‘regular’. Rhythmic writing is ‘when the tendency of the writing, whether regular or irregular, is maintained from beginning to end’.
* Billie Pesen Rosen, The Science of Handwriting Analysis, p.188. This last one, so airily despatched, I don’t think any responsible psychiatrist would nowadays risk – the possibility of a law suit is just too strong if the suicide threat proved more genuine than the handwriting suggested. Also, I have to say, I wouldn’t trust Ms Pesen Rosen from the moment she kicks off with the imprecation, ‘Supplement your knowledge of human nature with the rich revelations of graphology!’ She is, too, the only graphologist-psychologist I found who seriously revived the Spencerian suggestion that handwriting was not just a way of analysing your character defects, but that through making conscious changes in your handwriting, you could actually improve your character, in this case by boosting your self-esteem: ‘To prove to yourself that you have faith in the well-known power of the will, and to encourage the fruition of this plan, remember to raise the height of the personal pronoun I while you are writing. After a while your unconscious mind will accept this new concept of yourself, and when you write, the letter I will take on new height without any conscious effort on your part.’ [p.35].
* Monsters from the Id!
* What did he mean? (I have reasons to think this marginaliast was a man.) That no American has sex before marriage? That every married American is perfectly satisfied with the amount and quality of sex he has?
* The last two observations precede the great sociologist Erving Goffman’s observations of performed actions by forty years or so.
* An interesting light is cast on this peculiar observation by Charlus’s claim, much later in the novel, in The Prisoner, that Odette ‘couldn’t spell to save her life, I had to write all her letters’. Does Charlus’s handwriting have an affectation of British stiffness on ill-formed letters? Or is he boasting pointlessly and wrongly at the Verdurin’s, much later?
* Few graphologists would seriously suggest, subsequently, that family resemblances to one’s ancestors or (more plausible a reading of Proust’s point here) social class can be deduced from handwriting.
* Of Lonrho, responsible for one of the most famous crooked episodes in the City, described by the British Prime Minister Edward Heath as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’.
† Presentable at court, used in a metaphorical sense.
* It scores 8.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness. By comparison, steel scores 4–4.5 and diamond scores 10.
* A comedian reviews the wonderful Bic ballpoint pen on Amazon.co.uk, drawing attention to many of its miraculous qualities as though they were too ordinary to be worth mentioning. Should have spent more time in school learning to spell, and less in attempting to be cool:
‘I was looking for an upgrade from my HB2 Pencil and I was unsure about what to go for until I came across this Bic pen.
I was realy excited about opening my new product once it had arrived, I removed a pen from its protective packaging which was realy well sealed. For the first few days after ordering my new pen I was slightly unsure about how to actualy use it, it came with no instruction guide, it was untill later on in the week and countless hours of attempting to write I hit Google and realised that the black tip at the end was removable only to reveal the ‘nib’ of the pen. This black romovable think was infact a lid to keep ink fresh.
Ok so onto performance, after I started to write(also this pen may be used for doodling and scibbling) I was amazed at the quality of the ink, it was no cheap ink like you would find in other cheap pens at your local retailers, this ink is something special, and it does not smudge either.
The biggest major flaw with this pen(which is possibly a design fault) is that I am assuming this pen is for left handers only(although the packiging did not mention this) I think this because I can write superbly neat in my left hand but when I switch over to my right hand I start to write as if i were wearing a blindfold, so to all you ‘right handers’ stay away from this product.
The design of this pen was realy well thought out, the ‘see through’ barrel of the pen allows you to keep watch over how much ink you have left to write with in the pen, so when you are running out you can simply order a new pen in time.
A few days ago I stupidly lost the lid to my pen, I got onto Bic customer service to see if my pen was under warranty to see if they could send me a new one or simply replace my lid, the lady on the other end just laughed at me and hung up, this goes to show that the customer sevice for this company is not very good at all!
I take my new pen everywhere with me and could not leave home without it, somebody even saw that I had a brand new bic and asked me if they could borrow it! The cheeky fella must have realised how good this pen was as he tried to walk off with it, but I managed to get it back and he claimed ‘he forgot’.
Anyway I am overall pleased with this product.
Only negative points are the lack of instructions on operating this pen and the customer service is atrocious.
Three ***
* École Normale d’Administration. An institution for turning out supercilious French public servants, known as énarques, some of whom subsequently become notably inefficient politicians, and just now (May 2012) President of the Republic without ever having run anything. It was set up by General de Gaulle in 1945 and has been loathed by most right-thinking Frenchmen ever since.
* I’ve just checked on American Amazon, and you can (2012) buy ten Bic Cristal pens for $1.47, or a shade under 15 cents a pen. There are things which have got cheaper in cash terms over fifty years, but somehow you don’t expect the Bic pen to be one of them.
* Reginald Piggott, whose Survey has already supplied one eccentric moment to this book in his study of different-coloured writing inks and what they signify in the hands of ballet dancers and lady novelists, now supplies another with a madly instructive drawing headed ‘Correct Method Of Filling Fountain Pen’. In three drawings, Mr Piggott shows us INCORRECT METHOD, where only half the nib is in the ink, CORRECT METHOD, with labels indicating LEVEL OF INK, POINT OF NIB CLEAR OF BASE, and NIB COMPLETELY SUBMERGED. In the third drawing, a totally reckless penman is shown INCREASING INK LEVEL, where a half-filled bottle of ink is apparently tipped off the side of a table at an angle of about 30 degrees without evident support, while the pen is dipped into the deeper end. Thinking about the white sheepskin rug which inevitably sat under this suicidal enterprise, it took me some time to realize that Mr Piggott was actually recommending this procedure, rather than just warning against the consequences of doing anything other than going to buy a fresh bottle of Waterman’s.
* Pangram: a sentence containing all twenty-six letters, useful for handwriting exercises and to test keyboards. The most famous is the classic ‘The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog’, which dates back to 1888, making it coeval with the invention of the typewriter. People often write ‘jumped’, which makes it no longer a pangram. Other pangrams worth considering include ‘Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex!’, ‘Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes’ and ‘My jocks box, get hard, unzip, quiver, flow’, which you might write on a pad in Harrods, but never, ever, ever, in Peter Jones. A charming novel by Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea, is about an island whose inhabitants worship the creator of the ‘lazy dog’ pangram.
* According to Reginald Piggott, v. supra.
* ‘In spite of computers, handwriting instruction is important because of carry-over to composition’, University of Washington News, 30 January 1998.
* The Queen, it is known, writes a diary by hand. In some documentary about ‘A Year in the Life of Her Maj’, the Archbishop of Canterbury was discovered finding out, while in the Presence, that this was so, and was recorded saying something to the effect of ‘What? You write it on your own? In your own hand?’ The Queen responded by saying, ‘Well, I don’t know any other way of doing it’, the implication being that she thought the cleric was suggesting that she dictated it to a flunky, writing with a swan’s quill on vellum. I dare say that, as time has gone on, the question of security and privacy has arisen, and the Household, or just Her Majesty, has rightly concluded that what is written by hand can’t be sent off to the Daily Express with a press of a button by some disgruntled and underpaid junior in her private office.
* For non-English readers: the Nice Day Out is a national pastime and institution. The rules are as follows: You identify a beauty spot, country house, small historic town, within forty-five minutes to ninety minutes of your home. You travel there by bus or train or (slightly inauthentically) your own transport made by M. Citroën or the Bavarian Motor Company or some such. You get off, and take a walk round the designated destination. You and your chosen companion have lunch in a pub or teashop. After lunch, light-headed with pleasure, you buy an absurd souvenir of the place, OR have a short but telling argument over nothing very much. Late in the afternoon you take the public transport back home, remarking as you get off at Clapham Junction that you don’t know why, but you don’t think there’s a single thing in the fridge for dinner. At some point in this outing, from now on, you will also buy a postcard and send it to your mum and dad.