I’ve never learned how to keyboard. (Typing it was called, when I started on my literary career.) My earliest stories took twice as long to submit as they did to write. Whenever I was preparing the fair copy of something that I hoped might be published, it was always at the bottom of the page that I perpetrated the series of errors that was beyond the aid of Tipp-Ex. So roll in another sheet of paper and start again.

Four times in my life I’ve started courses that guaranteed to turn me into a proficient keyboarder in a ludicrously short time. All failed. By the time I’d eradicated all the embedded keyboarding faults that needed to go before I could actually learn anything, I’d lost heart.  (Not everyone uses their right thumb to depress Q – how odd.)

And I envy touch-typers, love to watch them. Fingers career across the keyboard like a barefoot tap-dancer on a hot stove top. And the touch-typers don’t even look at them! Instead they maintain that serene, slightly superior look that is intensely irritating.

Things changed when I bought my first computer (Remember Amstrads?) Now I could correct mistakes on screen – not on paper. Speed of output doubled. Now I was submitting twice the number of stories. Unfortunately, twice the number of stories weren’t being accepted – but that’s another a story.

And computers aren’t fool-proof. When the Muse is upon me I tend to attack the keyboard with the same verve as that with which, as a child,  I played Chopin’s One-Minute Waltz. (In my case, Chopin’s Ninety-three Second Waltz.)  Accuracy quails before passion.

For any target key there can be up to nine contiguous keys. Any of the nine is likely to be the landing place of the over-enthused finger. Strange words appear on the screen when finally you look at what you think you have written. And sometimes they have a life peculiarly of their own. In their broken-backed way, they are moving.

The Romantic passage appended below is constructed from mistakes I have made and saved. I feel they have a melancholy beauty. And they go some way to explaining what happened when James Joyce was writing Finnegan’s Wake.

My love-in liver

My yeart was brating dast, tight from the girst time I saw him.  My bloid was on dire. I felf that never afain would I see a mab so tandsine or so sell-dredded.
Oud coyttshop was dektt. Ince his pickered lups were wo flice to mune I could so bithing to tedist him. He jissed me and I lelted in his atns. His timgue batessed the onsode of my nuorg.

‘Farling,’ he sald, and his glue ryrs twonkled as he sloke, ‘do I have to tell you how much I pove you? And I would pove you core if obly you would pive with me. As the loet said, ‘come love with me and be my live.’

Do I rent to dray with him. His laddion never pessened and so in tome I afreed ti di that whoch he woshed.  Now I am gappy. Geaser, I harried him.

(The writer would like to note with a modicum of pride that he has just scored a record-breaking number of red-underlinings.)