I went shopping for a stylus the other day after deciding to go paperless and give up writing the old-fashioned way on a paper notebook. Many of my fellow journos still lug around the notepads that must have been designed for stenographers, an occupation that was once made famous by Hollywood movies and now seems to have slowly faded away as bosses today shoot off their own emails.

I have tons of such notebooks lying around in my flat as I am afraid to get rid of them, in the wrong belief that they may have some information of importance, that I may need in the future, that had been uttered by someone I had interviewed. Or that it may have a phone number that I had hurriedly jotted down and hadn’t transferred to my mobile phone. My wife has threatened to chuck them in the bin one day, like the way she trashed the newspapers I had been saving from the time Guttenberg may have invented the movable type printing press in his garage.

“This is a record of my life’s work I shouted,” as she moved the bundles of decaying paper to the balcony , where one day it rained and soaked them to pulp and my by-line articles looked like they were written by some ancient Egyptian on soggy papyrus.

I am not sure how I ever typed my articles after the interviews because when I opened one notebook the other day I just couldn’t understand what I had written. It was full of scribbles, some dates and quotation marks.

A veteran journalist who once gave us a refresher course said something that has stuck at the back of my mind: “If you write something you do not understand, you risk making errors.”

But if you are on a deadline, with an editor on your back, shouting that he needs the copy in five minutes, and you cannot understand a word you have written in your notebook, then things get a bit sticky. After many years of incomprehension concerning my writing, I stopped using notebooks and instead shoved a digital recorder in people’s faces. It’s another story that I once nearly knocked out the front teeth of someone important, when the guys jostling behind me pushed my elbow while I was asking him a question.

Newspapers are great to read early in the morning with your first cup of coffee or a piping, hot ‘chai’, but something happens to them after a couple of years, as I realised one day.

I had taken the cuttings of my articles from way back in time, for a job, and thought I would impress the interviewer. Half way through the interview, I pulled out the cuttings from a plastic cover and an unearthly smell pervaded the place, like as if an ancient curse was unleashed. It was the combination of decaying paper and ink that had created the tomb-like smell. I hurriedly put back the paper cuttings into the plastic envelope and used it as a fan to fan away the sudden musty smell in the room that reminded me of my trip to a museum in Cairo.

Back to my hunt for a stylus, I found out that none of them worked as efficiently as a ballpoint pen. Most of the styluses were for sketching rather than for writing. I write with my hand resting on the tablet and it unfortunately registers it on the page. I found the stylus was also not as comfortable as holding a pen; they are more for tapping on a page or for swiping the page.

So I decided to go retro and buy what was once known as a fountain pen. I am once again learning to write legibly with it.