Last month, I went on holiday to a small town at the bottom of Spain that I have been visiting for more than 20 years, where a friend asked: “Why is your Spanish still so bad?”
“Er,” I said, struggling to remember how to say in Spanish that, after decades of fitful studies, there had in fact been times when I could speak as well as any local four-year-old.
This was not one of those times, unfortunately. So I went home, sat down and started writing out lists of verb conjugations by hand, which was when I discovered something worse. My handwriting, never good, had turned into barely legible scrawl. My words jerked across the page like the trails of a snail dunked in crystal meth. The very act of writing was a strain. Years of typing and texting had taken an unattractive toll.