In most households, a pen is just that — a pen. In mine, a pen was something to be treasured and treated with careful reverence. That’s because, the rest of us have always wanted to be as brilliant at calligraphy as my father is.

Very recently, my father, after nearly 55 years, managed to get in touch with an ex-RAF officer Henry Chambers who was once with him on a Pilot Attack Instructor Course in Leconfield, Yorkshire, UK in 1953. Two years ago, he saw a letter of my father’s in the Daily Telegraph in UK and sent him a letter just addressed to Gp Capt Kapil Bhargava (Retd), Bangalore India. The letter reached him with only a slight local delay.

Henry Chambers and my dad had many good times together during the course, where they claim they were the only ones not “chasing skirt”, preferring instead to spend hours talking about classical music and calligraphy.  calligraphy. My dad had given Henry a sample of his calligraphy on a sheet from a notebook. Henry suddenly found this calligraphed piece and sent my father a scan of it. The paper was yellowed and frayed at the edges and had some smudges in places. But it still looks great.

Although he hasn’t done it in a while, my dad also used to do the most amazing nail etchings.

But I must say, this isn’t the best example of his calligraphy I’ve seen. He’s written out Shakespeare’s sonnets on handmade paper, using red ink to embellish capital letters at the start of a sentence. All the lines always looked 3-dimensional, or “thick and thin” as we used to call them.

I tried and tried but  I never got anywhere near as good. I had a nice Victorian good-girl writing when I tried hard, but it would lapse into an all-over-the-place scrawl if left to its own devices. I even tried writing decoratively in Hindi in my music book. The results were at best, amusing, as you can see in this photograph. .

I will still only write in black ink and I still lovely delicious, juicy blank paper, but my little bit of a copybook-neat handwriting has been stomped out by my keyboard.