Why I think that if my handwriting could be read I'd own a quill

            I feel that my attitude to technology is quite an odd one. That is to say I don''t know many people who feel the same; or I know few who, feeling the same, act and acquire in a similar way to me. Since it has been possible for me to download music or films I have not deigned to use such outdated formats as the CD or DVD. Digital, I often pronounced was better. It is indeed more convenient, cheaper and more flexible than traditional media. However present me with a record player made 30ish years before I was born and I will fawn all over it like a cat presented with a tuna fish covered in catnip. Records, I am wont to argue, feel different when you listen to them almost live. I will squeal with ill-concealed delight at the crackling sound the needle makes when it is first lowered to the exquisitely solid and, usually, black ridged disc that somehow, with voodoo I assume, transmits sound. I happily weather skips and scratches whilst pointing out that the fact you can't choose a track preserves the artists intention  for the album, even when forced to listen to four truly horrid Bonnie Tyler tracks to get to total eclipse of the heart.  
  
             Whilst this seems a relatively minor eccentricity (it is I wont apologise for that because if this blog is for nothing else its for discussion of inconsequential topics in a grandiose whitttering style.) it becomes more odd and difficult when attached to my creativity. I cannot handwrite legibly yet I absolutely insist on writing poems with a  pen on preferably Mokeskine paper note pads. To an outsider it seems an idiotic folly for me to write illegibly on  expensive paper especially when what I am writing is often important to me. to defend my sanity I say this; I find it hard to write when I have the backlit screen of a laptop blaring back at me. Quite beyond this I love the experience of writing on high quality creamy paper.  I enjoy savouring the experience of writing. The only black spot the one thing that bothers me, beyond my not infrequent fury at being able to read the slice of genius that I wrote the night before, is the pen I use the mass produced brio. Its as crass and soulless as the computer I avoid. I cannot reasonably use a fountain pen because... well you can only clean up so much ink before it gets old. I have recently come upon an idea to cure this preposterous difficulty, and now the idea's in my mind it is inevitable, I intend to buy an antique type writer to write poetry, fiction and most likely shopping lists and notes and other miscellanea on.

            Why this obsession with outmoded formats and antique tools? I think if I was to try and explain it i would have to use the word weight. The older something is the more solid it seems in an almost spiritual sense more real. When you write on a mokeskine note pad the very paper seems to say what is written here matters. Not only to me but because the notepad itself has a, questionable, history connecting it to my heroes; Van Gough, Hemingway and Picasso among them. Not an odd and shallow and faddy aesthetic principal but an appeal to history.