Ages since I last wrote a blog post…but hopefully that’s about to change. I am now the proud owner of my very own laptop…Many thanks to Dan who took my list of what I wanted it to do, read up for me, made recommendations, and even collected it today.
The title is an attempted play on Virginia Wolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own“, esentially arguing for women to be given status as writers. The notion is that a woman who wants to write needs somewhere to call her own. In Wolf’s view, it was having a room, somewhere to go, and in her terms, to write fiction.
Now, with the internet, there’s plenty of places to go to write, and plenty of things to write, too. But having the means to write…that’s the key.
Years ago when I wrote lots – a daily diary, regular poetry, as well as lots of school work – it was pretty much all long hand. Paying attention to my English teacher, I learned to touch type as a skill he said was really useful – and this really before computers were making much of a presence in schools.
Turns out that now, as he described, it really is just as easy to compose when typing as when writing by hand. Easier in some ways, faster, with a certain happy rhythm to it. Not that I don’t like writing by hand, but I found that the words don’t flow in quite the same way now.
So, here’s to my own laptop. In time, maybe I’ll lower my standards, even use it for work in the 9-5 sense. But the big reason for getting it is finally to have a computer to play on, to do fun stuff. The writing, the surfing etc, is meant to be for leisure, rather than justified by performance or to do lists.
Talking to a few other women, it does seem to continue to be the case that the men rather hog the computer in evenings and weekends. Mine has the excuse of running his own business, and working from home is a perk in this case.
But I thought there could well be a reason why there’s more men writing their own blogs than women, and time on the computer is probably part of it…
So, some rom – even some ram - of my own. Here’s to making the most of it.