A blister-free exam? Please, a pen licence should be a mark of pride

Teachers themselves would rarely type, preferring to handwrite any class tests. A trusty Gestetner machine would then see these notes mechanically, and aromatically, reproduced.

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The smell of the purple printing fluid would last for weeks, causing a sort of dreamy psychosis in most classrooms. Some blame LSD for the psychedelia of the 1960s, but it was mostly the Gestetner.

Years later, I still have a sort of Pavlov’s dog response. Open a bottle of methylated spirits and I’ll start chanting the six times table.

Meanwhile, there were upsides to being part of a generation in which handwriting was king. Writing down a date or a quote still fixes it in my head in a way that typing fails to do.

Writing is also slower than typing and – in my case anyway – better suits the plodding speed of my thoughts. Typing out a thank you letter, I sometimes find I’ve finished before I really worked out what I wanted to say.

There was another pleasure in the era of the handwritten letter. Love letters often contained illustrations. Nothing untoward, you understand, but perhaps a burst of love hearts or a border of tangled flowers, drawn in biro and then coloured in.

If you were very lucky, there might even be a lipstick kiss. This would normally be on the letter, but sometimes – among those who didn’t care what the postie thought – on the envelope itself.

Fetching it from the letterbox involved a level of anticipatory joy I’ve never experienced from an email.

Handwriting was also useful when you wanted to scribble in the margins of books. I know some people will be horrified, but marking books is one of my great pleasures: not library books, of course, but anything I own.

I’ll underline favourite bits, put an exclamation mark against an infelicitous phrase and add the occasional “amazing” against a passage that is, well, amazing.

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I know you can do this with an e-book, but does anyone bother?

Years later, you read the same book again and rate the judgements of your younger self. Why did you like that bit, but seem oblivious to the passage that’s so clearly at the heart of the novel?

And why did you think that bit was funny? Perhaps time has changed you and this old paperback has become a palimpsest recording your changing self.

Later, after we’d left school, we were trained on typewriters, which had their positives and negatives. The Gestetner fluid may have disappeared, but its intoxicating effects were still available by use of Liquid Paper – a correcting fluid, bizarrely enough, invented by the mother of Monkees guitarist Mike Nesmith.

You also had to avoid perching a coffee cup on the right of the typewriter as it would be knocked over each time you hit the “carriage return”.

The typewriter soon joined the Gestetner in the dust bin of history, leaving people with nothing but a keyboard, a computer, and printing ink with no detectable smell.

It’s progress, of course it is, most especially for those who’ll be able to do a blister-free HSC. It will be almost as good as a love letter with a kiss.

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