Over Easter, I sat down to write a letter.

My writing is appalling. Even with a new fountain pen, it still looks like our house spider has run wild over a blob of spilled ink.

It was not always so. In school, learning joined-up writing was a rite of passage. You left the babies’ classes and grew up behind a wooden flip desk with an ink well.

We used pens with crude metal nibs to dip into the ink, then spent hours scritchy-scratching our cursives.

Nuala McCann: A love letter to the dying art of handwriting

‘Events’, Parnell and Sinn Féin’s embrace of constitutional nationalism – Patrick Murphy

I could never emulate the copperplate script of my parents. And times moved on and along came shorthand and computers and my ability to write legibly dashed off and hid itself in a dark nook, just like our house spider.

I blame Teeline. Now my husband laughs when I hand him a........

© The Irish News