The Idler, Tuesday, January 28

One-fingered

maestro

columnist

 

THE other day I was reading the column of my Cape Town counterpart, David Biggs – always entertaining – when he managed to astonish me twice.

Astonishment 1: David has been writing his daily Tavern of the Seas column in the Cape Argus for more than 40 years. Is this a record or what?

Astonishment 2: David tells us he can't type. He just stabs at the keyboard with his right index finger. How much has he churned out over 40-plus years in this painstaking way?

"Some readers have even told me their grandfathers used to read my columns, and then their fathers.

"For more than 40 years I have been hammering away at keyboards: first manual typewriter keyboards and then electric keyboards and finally 'touch-screen' boards, which seem to be only pictures of keyboards. Now I feel I need to make a public confession. I cannot type.

"I look with awe at competent typists who tickle out reams of words by running their nimble fingers across the keys. And I blush to admit I cannot type. All those daily columns (not to mention a couple of published books and magazine articles) have been pecked out laboriously, one letter at a time, using only my right index finger."

Wow! I say David Biggs deserves a medal.

 

 

Fast but erratic

 

HOW many fingers do I type with? Er, both index fingers mainly plus a few of the others here and there. It seems to work, it just gets into a tangle if you try to think about it. I reckon I'm faster than most touch typists but a bit erratic. (I'll beat David Biggs by a mile).

During a stint as a journalistic vagrant about Africa, I also learned to use the French keyboard on the telex machines (no email in those days), which is tiny compared with our QWERTY layout and you use only one hand (David Biggs would have been quite at home).

We also had the press telegram, where you whacked it out on a special form and handed it in at the local post office.

I did this once at a place called Vila Luso, in a remote part of Angola where' I'd just interviewed a Portuguese general who'd concluded a peace agreement with the guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi. It seemed rather important.

I handed in my despatch to a Portuguese clerk who spoke not a word of English and my heart sank as I watched him tap it out on a morse key to another Portuguese clerk in Lisbon, who would tap it out again to Johannesburg.

Sure enough, the resultant jumbled nonsense never made it into any newspaper. But it was pinned on the noticeboard as an example of my typing prowess after imbibing liquor. So unfair!

 

 

Price list

 

LIMERICK time. Chris Taylor, a stalwart of the Natal cricket society, sends in some lines from a friend in England illustrating how thoughtful they are about catering for the needs of the disabled, including the unsighted.

 

On the breast of a barmaid in Hayle

Was tattooed the price of the ale.

And on her behind

For the sake of the blind

The same was printed in braille.

 

Yes, very thoughtful the Poms are about this kind of thing.

 

 

Tailpiece

It's not my fault that I have typing mistakes, it's in my blood. I'm type O negative.

 

Last word

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. - Lily Tomlin