Drag Queen are far less dangerous than this...

There is a jolly nice thing which happens in some libraries and school, where super glamorous drag queens read stories to children.

I think this is great, not going to lie, but a lot of people seem to be very upset by this, despite the fact that for generation legions of children have been taken to see pantomimes at Christmas, where not only will there be a male actor dressed up in female clothing and giving a performance more camp than a line of tents, but probably a storyline where a young woman dressed as man, romances a young woman dressed as a young woman - and they’ve all grown up fine!

Pantomime is not a tradition which has translated to America, a bit like gun control and logic, so this may be why it’s over there that the very (un)silent majority have thrown up their hands and got upset about this, and we’ve been a bit more chill about it. Encouraging children to read is such vital work that, should they be more inclined to listen if being read to by someone in a towering wig and false eyelashes, lets not knock it. If you’re straight and worried that seeing a drag queen will turn all of the children in year two gay, just remember that all the grown ups who are gay, had nothing but straight role models as they grew up, alongside often rampant homophobia, and they are still gay, so I think it takes more than a pinch of drag to determine sexuality.

(On no it doesn’t! Oh yes it does….and so on.)

But if you want to get upset about something which is in my opinion, a real threat to child development, I heard last week about a primary school which is giving up teaching handwriting and instead is giving each child at the school a laptop instead, saying that handwriting is ‘irrelevant’ going forward.

Wow - that’s really happening people, unlike the ridiculous moral panic about children identifying as cats, we’re letting this happen.

If this doesn’t immediately grab you as dangerous, and bear in mind I am a parent of an autistic child who struggles a great deal with handwriting and would much rather use an ipad, let me explain why I think this is terrible.

When I used to be a careers office a few years back, a deeply ironic position to be held by someone with such a weird job history as me, I used to keep an ear to the ground for interesting career related news. One such item was an interview with the surgeon general, who was saying how when confronted by a row of almost identical exam results from A grade students and a limited number of places for them to train to be surgeons, he would always turn to their list of hobbies, looking for any who listed embroidery, knitting or sewing. This was because nowadays the dexterity of candidates was so reduced, due to their use of digital technology, that many struggled to become surgeons not because they didn’t know what they were doing, but because they simply didn’t have the hand eye control. 

Needless to say, removing the skill of handwriting takes us further down that path towards physical literacy, which slowly but surely cuts us off from self sufficiency. It may be a small thing to not be able to mend your clothes, but then again the less able you are to do things for yourself, the more dependant you become. 

There is also the issue of handing the means of communication, over to those who gift it to us. Sure, right now it might be fine to write on phones and the rest, but let us not forget that a phone or a laptop is a great deal more expensive than a pen and paper. If you need to rely on a piece of technology which you cannot afford to buy without getting in debt, then your means of communication is owned by someone else. If someone else own it, someone else controls it - a control which they may not exercise now, but that does not mean that they might not do in the future.

If like me you take a perverse delight when autocorrect suggests a sentence which you never intended to write, and you steam over it with a sense of victory, there is also the issue of the voice of the writer. (Auto correct attempted to insert ‘wrestler’ instead of writer, thus proving my point live) it is also worth considering in just who’s voice the nascent generation of writers will be speaking in, if their words are basically suggest for them by Ai. It is the mark of societies throughout history to develop their own language as a mark of definition, be that the work jargon of ‘Blue Sky thinking’ or the code words hidden in the dialect of enslaved people, it all serves as a short hand which keep a group together and, when needed, keep an authority out of the loop. If we teach children that the only words they can write, the only phrases they can use, are a kind of generic bland ‘uni-speak’, we are teaching them yet again that they have no agency over what they write. If they have no agency to tell their own stories in their own words, then ultimately are well telling them to think in the same, bland, uni-thoughts?

I think George Orwell would have been impressed, or horrified, at just how much that smacks of ‘new speak,’ which, if you’ve been pretending all these years to have read 1984, is the government approve dialect imposed on the workers, where necessary words are removed to save time. Things are not magnificent, wonderful or beautiful, but simply good, plus good or even plus, plus good - because superfluous words lead to unnecessary thoughts, or wrong thoughts. 

I suppose it may seem dystopian to suggest that a primary school in Ashford is the vanguard of Big Brother, but I do think it is a intensely backward step to try and remove hand writing from our children. The act of making your mark, be it with wet paint on the wall of a cave, a stylus into clay or a quill into ink, is an act of defiance against the passage of time, a small footnote to say ‘I was here’ or, in the case of graffiti artists everywhere ‘I woz ‘ere.’ I am not suggesting that we insist that they spend hours attempting to write in perfect copper plate script, but the discipline of learning to form letters and words into thoughts and dreams, is so fundamental to the human learning experience that I do find it’s removed to be bordering on the repressive. 

In other news, my Art work ‘The Night Witch’ came second in the annual British Fantasy Society’s art prize, who praised it for its exquise line work - which I certainly could not have achieved without learning to write by hand as a child.

This means that I will also have a spot at their Fantasy Con in 2025, which is rather exciting, especially as I didn’t get a place in the Brighton Book Art fair this December - which I was rather hoping to be at.

Never mind, I finished the third painting in my Alice Series - and will be launching all three as limited edition prints in the next few weeks - watch, as they say, this space!