I have been re-reading Colette and came upon this passage where she describes her father’s writing desk:

A pad of virgin blotting paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colours; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing pens no thicker than a blackbird’s quill; sealing wax, red, green and violet; a hand blotter, a bottle of liquid glue… a big inkpot flanked by a little inkpot, both in bronze, and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page, another bowl containing sealing wafers of all colours (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams and reams of paper, cream-laid, ruled, watermarked…

And Colette in this passage doesn’t even enter into the seductive smell of a stack of unused paper. I used to love to go into stationers’ shops and prowl around and look at all the paper-related gadgets. Now I fear the magic of such places is being lost or at least is becoming a marginalised luxury for print and writing hobbyists, scrapbookers and the like. I am certainly attached to my computer gadgetry – I delight in the variety of things my iPod Touch enables me to do and enjoy tinkering and adding functionality even when I don’t really need it - but the enchantment is not aesthetic. Compare the passage above with this attempt of mine…

A new MacBook pristinely white with its unblinking webcam eye staring back at me, surrounded by snaking cables bringing power in, trailing out to the superfluous but more convenient mouse and to a colour printer which dwarfs the computer it serves but which languishes days without being used in this increasingly paperless and environmentally conscious world. Invisibly also it connects to the unseen wider world of the internet via WiFi…

No, even had I Colette’s gifts I think I would find it hard to visualise computers and their accessories as comparably aesthetically pleasurable instruments to use. Of course we have gained in efficiency from the change from atoms to bits for communication but every so often I am reminded of what we are slowly losing.