What Do You Write With?

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While anything you see here is typed, or rather, word-processed, much of my writing starts life in pen and ink. I feel lost without a pen to hand and most of my pens are straight-forward cheap biros. I lose valuable pens too easily, and often wander off with pens from offices, shops or borrowed off friends too. It isn’t conscious theft. I just use a pen and instinctively put it into a pocket. I even end up with those little pens used in catalogue stores and if I see betting shop pens lying dumped in the streets I salvage those. I often end up with pens leaking in my pockets or my bag. I hate being in mid-flow writing something as a pen runs out on me. I hate fountain pens and pencils for writing with. Oddly my hand-writing is terrible to read, being illegible to most beside myself. As a writer (author and poet) I see pens as tools of my trade. Many writers don’t carry them, which to me is like a plumber having to borrow a wrench or a mechanic without a spanner. My computer to me is just a glorified electric type-writer. No publisher accepts hand written work, and my earliest odes were done with an old Smith-Corona manual type-writer which I had for years, but the good old pen is something I hate to be apart from. What about you? What do you like to write with? Arthur Chappell