Way back when, aged twelve, thirteen perhaps, at school, I sat close to a guy from along the valley who had been taught to write using italics. No special pen, just shaped his letters... perhaps crafter his letters would be more accurate, in an italic hand. Only very slightly slower than the rest of us, the end result I found very pleasing on the eye, and being of that bent, tried to copy his script. Few letters were markedly different, perhaps the lowercase e, maybe a couple of others, his descenders were properly shaped to tuck away into the body etc. Anyway, being young, never seen it before, I found it fascinating. Cut to my mothers handwriting. In the thirties I guess, she'd been taught to write in something close to copper plate, again far far neater than I'd been taught. She never pushed it onto us, just believed it to be the 'right' way to write. In combination it left me with a background interest in script. Not palegraphy, just neat handwriting, something I have never really had. I could write fast, fill in the blank answer papers, but never do it in a hand of which I could be proud. I never spent the time to develop my early efforts into a habit.

More recently I've been following Liam and his interest in old books. Of note I found more than a few examples of his work. I guess that revived the dormant interest in calligraphy in me, and I started googling for scripts. I'm currently reading the second of the Ken Follet novels on C13 England, which I find a fascinating period. Possibly with that in mind I soon settled on a script named Carolingian Miniscule, see this for a one para history. The key point for me was the statement

Carolingian Minuscule was developed at the request of the Emperor Charlenmange, to be used throughout his land, which included Western and Central Europe. While illiterate himself, he held a love of letters and realised that a unified writing system that would aid in literacy across his empire would be beneficial to its survival and growth.

How's that for foresight? The guy who brought a unified writing system to the (then) known worldd. The prime pre-requisite was legibility, I guess a second was ease of use. The 'miniscule' seems to infer lower case only, possibly again for legibility. wikipedia has more, and a good example. Although it developed over the next five hundred years and morphed into various others, the tone was set for shared reading, I guess lining things up for Gutenberg and friends?

Anyway, having seen all these examples I started to put pen to paper so to speak, realising the level of patience these guys on the high stools in monastories must have had! Even using a dip pen became a frustration, goodness knows what it was like doing this for years at a time? Another example of the ten thousand hour rule? . This weekend, I tried a variation. I was wanting some way of capturing the stroke sequences for some of the letters, not clear at all. I opened inkscape and lo and behold, there was a 'calligraphy pen'! Once I'd set the pen angle closer to 40 degrees it started to work really well! OK, I admit it, it looks as if I have been on the bottle for three days, shaky lines aren't in it. I'll wait till I'm closer to the 10K hours to get rid of that! Apart from the shakes, the other niggle I have is with my pen and tablet. I don't think... no, I haven't yet found, a way to set up the tablet such that inkscape responds to the pressure, one thing used widely in the world of calligraphy. Had me smiling though.