Not for the first time, I’ll say it: Umberto Eco is right. It’s true: penmanship is lying on the scrap pile of history, partially buried by poetry, 5 1/4″ floppy disks, and a picture of Madonna from when she didn’t look like a veiny prop from a horror movie about undead hairdressers. Here Eco looks at the various nails in handwriting’s coffin (from which, presumably, Madonna could rise at any moment to steal your children and bang out a few hours on your BowFlex trainer).

Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it’s well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters.

In an interview, a teacher said that students also make lots of spelling mistakes, which strikes me as a separate problem: doctors know how to spell and yet they write poorly; and you can be an expert calligrapher and still write “guage” or “gage” instead of “gauge”.

I know children whose handwriting is fairly good. But the article talks of 50% of Italian kids – and so I suppose it is thanks to an indulgent destiny that I frequent the other 50% (something that happens to me in the political arena, too).

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.