Oddly enough, in a world where technophiles and the gadget-obsessed continue to rave about Steve Jobs unveiling of the iPad last week, there’s only one gadget that I care about. An Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter from 1963, it doesn’t have a touchscreen or Wi-Fi connectivity, and as for playing games and listening to music — certainly not!
"I'll have the gargantuan egg, please."
Don’t let me fool you into believing that I don’t care much for technology: I love my iPhone as much as anybody else. It’s just that recently I realised that the technology around me was stopping me from getting things done. Some tasks just have to be done on a computer — correspondence, work invoices and, the unholiest of all things, tax returns — and that’s just fine. If I make a list, then I’ll get there. Eventually.
But as a writer cursed with the attention span of a hamster, working on a computer is the death knell to productivity. “I’ll just research ‘——’ can become a trawl through the news headlines, a lengthly perusal of gossip websites and even the googling of imagined illnesses. The truth is that I like to ‘see’ a draft as something that I can touch, write on, even burn (on occasion). I like to take something I’ve been working on outside, to look at it away from the usual two square metres in which I work. As someone who is perpetually distracted, I like to be away from distraction.
And that’s what my Olivetti gives me. My computer put away in a drawer, I sit at my desk with the pleasant clacking of the keys, and, unable to edit with the ease of copy and paste, I suddenly find myself thinking about what word I’m going to type next, and about where my story is going, rather than waiting to find out where my story is going to take me. Most satisfying of all, at the end of an hour, half an hour, or just a few minutes, there is a tangible thing in front of me that I can grapple with and score all over with my beloved red pen.
I have to admit that there’s something to be said about the place of modern technology in all this too: because after spending quality time with my Olivetti, I find there’s nothing like making a cup of tea and spending some time browsing the internet, content in the knowledge that I have a little time to spare after all that time well spent.
A Lettera 32 in its natural habitat
