a gentleman writer's accessory

My world will be happier if I can write a couple of pages.  A foundation for work on the road.  But I guess the best strategy is just to write on as if there were no travel obstacles ahead, and then, whilst traveling, pretend you’re comfortably at home. 

Well, I do have four fountain pens sitting here waiting to serve me.  Get all my notes together and attack!

Of course the peripatetic writer should be at home everywhere.  I love the portable offices, writing boxes, that Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen carried on their travels.  Word processors of the times.  How much harder that must have been -- trying to use a dip pen in a lurching carriage while maintaining a long train of thought might have been useful mental discipline.  The lap desk wobbling on your lap.

Here’s my “lap desk,” which I haven’t really used since I was writing novels in the back seat of a Volkswagen bus, back in the eighties.  I had built in a drop-down desk attached to the back of the passenger seat, so I could sit on the cooler and type or jot.  Even then I normally did my first drafts with a pen.  Then, ideally, an intermediate typed draft, perhaps red-penciled before the final draft, typed by someone else.  (Someone who can actually type -- I'm awful.)

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I do still sometimes use the lap desk as if it were the seventeenth century.  Perhaps for the same reason that I still use a fountain pen, when you can get four biros for a buck.