“Never waste a good crisis” is what the Obama crowd always say. Watching David Cameron saying that anyone interested in public service should consider applying to become a Tory parliamentary candidate made me think that the expenses row may be a Godsend for him. After all, what he needs to do to complete the modernisation of the party is to get rid of all those reactionary toffs with their moated piles and Mayfair flats — and until now they have proved rather difficult to eject. But now…?
Daily Archives: May 24, 2009
I type, therefore I am
This morning’s Observer column.
For writers of my (baby-boomer) generation and older, typewriters were the bane of our lives. On the one hand, you couldn’t work without one. On the other, they were a pain to use. Every time you made a mistake, or had second thoughts about a word or a phrase, you had to cross it out and laboriously type the revision. There was no such thing as cut and paste and no backspace-and-erase facility. So the result was often a page that became so awful to look at that in the end one tore it out in a rage, screwed it into a ball and typed the whole ruddy thing again. Cutting and pasting was done with scissors and word-counting by going over the typescript with a pencil, whispering numbers as you went.
Most people who use keyboards today have no inkling of this. Word-processing software has always been part of their lives. As a result, the writing process has subtly changed. As Marshall McLuhan said: we shape our tools and afterwards they shape us. Composing on screen has become more like sculpting…