This thought came to me today when I heard that Maggie is due to get her “pen licence” this year when she starts Year three in a few weeks.

I think I was in grade three when they gave us cartridge pens, but it may have been later.

I don’t remember much about them, except they seemed to scratch the paper, rather than write, and I had to use blotting paper under my hand, otherwise everything got smudged.

I’m pretty sure we only used cartridge pens for a couple of years.

According to this informative website: “The difference between conventional fountain pens and this class is that cartridge pens get their ink from a disposable ink cartridge, which is a small plastic container that fits into the pen. When the ink runs short, the cartridge can be replaced. Fountain pens have one permanent cartridge, and they get their ink from bottles.”

This writer continues to use a fountain pen today.

“A fountain pen trains you to write with light pressure and is much less tiring than a ballpoint, rollerball or pencil,” he says.

I struggled to think this morning why our teachers in 1975 would have thought a cartridge pen was better than a ballpoint, but the explanation above probably nails it.

The fact less pressure is required to write probably makes it easier for little ones. I guess it also gave us an appreciation of ink and legibility. There may have been merit as well in teaching cursive script.

Not that I have ever been particularly neat with my writing. In fact, my handwriting has deteriorated over the years as I’ve produced far more words using a keyboard than I have with a pen.

The rare occasions I write anything apart from my signature, like Christmas cards, are actually a chore and require significant concentration.

Maybe a cartridge pen would make it easier.

It’s about tennis player Alicia Molik, her comeback from injury and her disappointing first-round exit from the Australian Open.

I watched Molik play all of her matches in the Pro Tour event at Mount Gambier last year. Big crowds turned out to see her and I thought it was great that she came back via the regional circuit.

She’s a lovely lady and I hope she overcomes the Melbourne loss to make her mark on world tennis this year.

The Roar is an interesting site. It’s been going for a couple of years and has some high-quality sports commentary and discussion.

Please take a look and “cheer” my article.

Writing is a good habit to maintain.

A couple of my other sites like Australian Newspapers are virtually dormant.

I’m enjoying the brief format of Twitter at the moment though and Short Say.

Maybe that’s part of my problem here.

If you haven’t visited Short Say yet, take a look. Anyone can register and comment or post.

CAL sent me an email and left a phone message saying they wanted to pay me some money!

Like most people I’m suspicious of emails like that, and because I received the email before hearing the phone message, I almost sent it straight to the spam folder.

There were some links in the email to confirm bonafides, but I was suspicious of them and entered the addresses manually.

CAL is an Australian copyright management company whose role is to provide a bridge between creators and users of copyright material. CAL represents authors, journalists, visual artists, surveyors, photographers and newspaper, magazine and book publishers as their non-exclusive agent to license the copying of their works to the general community.

Everything looked legitimate, so I went ahead and provided my details, and followed up later with a phone call.

It turns out I’m entitled to $259 because a school made hard copies of my blog article on daylight saving in WA, presumably for study materials.

That’s marvellous. Not so much the money (which is sweet), but the fact something I’ve written has been used as a resource in a school.

It’s also great to know a not-for-profit organisation like CAL exists. They “have distributed over $500 million since 1989 and now represent the reproduction and communication rights of thousands of Australian authors, journalists, visual artists, surveyors, photographers and publishers”.

“CAL collects licence fees from organisations that copy, such as universities, schools, TAFEs, State and Federal governments, corporations, associations and press clipping agencies. CAL distributes this money to the rights holders whose works have appeared in CAL’s copying records.”

Under the Attorney-General’s Guidelines for Collecting Societies, CAL is able to allocate up to 1pc of licence fees to a cultural fund, which grants funds for cultural purposes as approved by the board.

My call today confirmed CAL is growing with the web.

All power to them and thanks from a small-fish writer for the service.

Opinion pieces for daily papers can be tricky, especially somewhere like Mount Gambier where we don’t cover much national news and don’t have access to AAP.

There are only so many local issues to opine about.

Editorial opinions are different to blogs. they can’t be outrageous and they need to have a certain gravity. It’s quite an art actually.

A newspaper has an advocacy role, I believe, on behalf of its community and editorial opinions should reflect that.

There aren’t always local issues to write about, which means you have to branch out, but in a logical way.

I won’t say I’m expert at writing them, but rather “not too shabby”.

He writes more wittily than I could ever hope to do about current political topics. I don’t think he’s from Perth, but he’s well across West Australian politics, including the current chair-sniffing and top-lifting incidents.

Overseas readers may even be aware the State Opposition leader Troy Buswell was exposed for sniffing a woman’s chair and thinking it a great laugh.

Matt covers the topic from a clever angle: “I think there’s one other party in this farcical episode who has been entirely forgotten and who deserves far more sympathy than either — namely, the chair. Poor thing. Probably sitting in some dingy bar somewhere, completely legless …”

He also touched on the South Australian record filibuster, which I meant to get around to commenting on.

It was never good, but it’s become worse. I struggled to write neatly in primary school; now it’s impossible.

I can print letters okay, but cursive script is atrocious.

Today I wrote Christmas messages for some key contacts.

I could barely read them myself. I blame two factors:

1) Typing. I’ve typed far more than I’ve written over the past 20 years. I barely write at all now, except short notes and my signature.

2) Work. I never learned proper shorthand, but developed my own version. It gives me useful notes of conversations, meetings and interviews. Only I can read it, so it’s almost like writing in code!

So, between lack of use and “writing” an alternative script I figure that I’ve lost the art of cursive script. Whether I need to rediscover it is debatable.

That’s a little surprising when you consider that journalists are writers. But when you think about it, we are craftsmen while novelists are artists. We ply a trade while they follow their creative spirits. We have responsibilities, they don’t.

Three good books about newspapers come readily to mind. PG Wodehouse wrote Psmith, Journalist in 1915; Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop in 1938 and Terry Pratchett published The Truth in 2000.

In Wodehouse’s classic, Psmith arrives in New York on a cricket tour and becomes involved with the home entertainment weekly “Cosy Moments” which he transforms into a hard-hitting investigative journal. He rides the bumps of organised crime and American politics along the way.

In Waugh’s story, scribe William Boot is mistaken by the publisher of the Daily Beast for a war correspondent. He is uprooted from writing country garden features to covering the civil war in Ishmaelia. Both novels are cleverly satirical.

Pratchett’s The Truth is a typically fantastic work from the author of the Discworld series. The hero in this case is William de Worde, who teams up with dwarfs to print the first newspaper in Ankh-Morpork.

As usual, Pratchett offers some tremendous insights into human nature. His observations of the newspaper profession are also very sharp, suggesting excellent research or personal knowledge. For instance, he offers a rare literary tribute to the unsung work of sub-editors.

I’ve just finished reading The Truth for the second time. I found the focus on hired assassins to be distracting and kept wanting the story to get back to the trials and tribulations of The Times.

There are some great one liners, like when the dwarfs make a typesetting error with the newspaper’s logo, which becomes: “The truth will make you fret”.

I related personally to the serial pest who kept coming into the office with remarkable vegetables. Anyone who has worked on a country newspaper will know there are people in most towns who like to show off their giant tomatoes or funny-shaped parsnips.

I admit it’s one of my long-term ambitions to write a satirical novel about newspapers. I started taking notes of strange but true incidents last year, like when one of my reporters disappeared while on the trail of visiting Mongolian detectives.

I have heaps of material; just need the time to write it.

I'm grateful that people think to invite me, but in a town the size of Kalgoorlie it's a similar guest list at most of the events.

It would be better, I think, to have one giant, shared Christmas party where all the corporates could get together and mingle. The Middle Island Fishing Club banquet was something like that, I suppose.

Then there could be another one for New Year.

Throw in your own company's Christmas party and that would mean three must-go events instead of a dozen or more individual parties.

Note: I'm writing this from WriteToMyBlog as an experiment.

Funnily enough, I’m writing this on the day that Google formally integrated its online spreadsheet application with Writely to create Google Docs.

I like the look and feel of Google Docs, which is minimalist in the Google tradition, but Zoho is also impressive. I’ll continue to experiment with it and give some more impressions here later.