There he goes again with his quirky little stories.

More like QWERTY stories as I painstakingly pound the keys on the computer, alternating between right and left forefingers in a soft pat pat of plastic on plastic.

Words like font, tab and qwerty didn’t just appear with the advent of the PC. They have been around since the 1870s.

In the halcyon days of the analogue seventies the clack clack clack ting of the typewriter could still be heard in many homes and countless offices. Like a crop of stiletto wearing debutantes rushing down a steep stairwell.

My father, the don of pen pushers, had a heavy black contraption, probably an Imperial, that would be brought out and hoisted on to the dining room table where he would while away the hours doing…………….I don’t quite know. Stuff that administrators do I guess. Most of the time he would talk into his Dictaphone for his secretary to type, so this must have been quite special. He didn’t write any novels that I am aware of unless his nom de plume was John Le Carre ! But he didn’t work for MI 5 or be part of the Bletchley Park code breakers like my mum was. That’s a story for another day.

On rare occasions I would be allowed to press a digit or two on the bronze circled keys. Not too many or too fast that the type bars would wedge together and you would have to prize them apart with the dexterity of a micro surgeon. Add to that feeding in the paper straight and not getting ribbon ink all over your fingers, it was a lot of pressure.

My brother had a funky avocado coloured portable model in his early university days. Like all of his possessions, I was forbidden to go anywhere near it. It might have been a Brother or an Olivetti perhaps made not that far from us in the Queenslie industrial estate East Glasgow. Sadly now defunct.

Although school in the seventies was comprehensive in that there were both boys and girls, certain subjects were deemed to be divided. While us boys did blokey stuff like wood and metalwork the fairer sex were offered domestic science or secretarial studies. Cooking and typing in other words which tended to be looked down upon. Just saying. It was the seventies. Coincidentally all I produced in two terms of woodwork and metal work was one pencil case and one trowel.

My wife, Pauline, tried a correspondence course (post schooling) in speed typing but confused it with her piano playing. Interesting poly rhythms but gobbledegook on the page !

Maybe I should become part of the ‘slow’ movement and pickup a second hand typewriter. Write my stories on it then fax it to OUATIT70s HQ for Colin and Paul to…………………..write it all out again on the computer and ………………………… maybe not.

(Post by John Allan from Bridgetown, Western Australia – September 2026)