I may be old-fashioned, but I love the process of writing with pen and ink on paper. I can touch-type and I type all my copy for The Press whether it is for the newspaper or the website. I am touch-typing this.

But when I am writing for myself, I like to have a pad of paper on my knee and a fountain pen in my hand.

Somehow the words feel closer to me without the barrier of a keyboard between the thoughts in my head and the written word.

The type of paper is important. I can happily spend ages browsing in a stationery shop comparing different letter pads, loose leaf pads, exercise books with or without spiral bindings on the side or at the top, notebooks with hard spines and covers etc.

Then there are the different types and weights of paper to consider, and if it is for that very old-fashioned version of communication, the private letter, the colour of the paper as well.

Having chosen what I am writing on, I then choose between my favourite pen and my everyday pen, both filled with washable blue ink. It has to be blue, not black and definitely not red or green ink.

Finally, I settle down to the joy of forming the letters and creating something that looks good as well as reads well.

Handwriting is, of course, much slower than bashing out words on a keyboard. So it has to be reserved for personal writing when I don’t have to worry about deadlines. But these days, some forms of personal writing can’t be done by pen and paper.

Social media demands the use of an electronic device. Try writing on Facebook or Twitter or sending a text message with a fountain pen. It just doesn’t work.

But thanks to an ever-increasing variety of devices, you are never apart from a means of sending your message to your friends, your work contacts and even the world in general.

As a professional and compulsive communicator, who adores words, I love the ability to talk electronically wherever and whenever I like.

It is so much easier than all the fuss and bother of finding a piece of paper, something to write on it, an envelope, a stamp and a letter box to send my words. How did we ever exist without social media?

The smartphones, iPads, iPhones, Blackberrys, etc etc are all so clever too and make fountain pens look like the sticks primitive men used to make marks on clay tablets. They correct your spelling and will finish your word for you before you have typed three letters.

But in some ways they are too clever.

They are very good at getting it wrong when they try to predict what you want to write and they hate unusual spellings. I have just about managed to persuade my phone that “Megi” is a perfectly acceptable word and not a mistype for the start of “neighbour”.

How many social media messages have you seen where the text predictor has inserted an apostrophe in “it’s” – as this iPad just has – when the author wanted to say “its”?

And I do wish the manufacturers wouldn’t keep designing their keyboards for midget fingers, so you mjss the letter you intended to hit and type something else.

Could someone please design a social media device that doesn’t think it knows best, uses a fountain pen and has the soft touch of paper, preferably 100g weight, A5 size, white, unlined. Or should that be 80g weight, A6 size, white, lined?

I have an urgent appointment. The stationery shop will close in an hour’s time.