Handwriting

My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen. My sister also has lovely writing, as does Clara. I have what can best be described as scrawl. There was a point in the late 2010s where I hadn’t written anything for so long I’d even started to lose some of the muscle memory, which I didn’t even think that was possible. I used to joke that the only words I ever wrote were on immigration cards when travelling, and even then I was half-joking about getting a custom stamp so I could fill them out quicker (not to get all Malcolm Gladwell on you, but turns out it’s more affordable than I thought). I’ve since started writing notes, to-do list items, and other daily life stuff in notebooks again to reduce my dependence on this intrusive slab of glass in my pocket, which has been a bit of a revelation. But I still encounter moments where I look at words I wrote scarcely a week earlier and think … is this ciphertext?! I’m…