Making like a Barbara Cartland

British romantic novelist Barbara Cartland wrote 723 books with estimated sales of one billion...
British romantic novelist Barbara Cartland wrote 723 books with estimated sales of one billion copies in 36 languages.
While images of the ancient quillsmiths etching their great works together by candlelight are utterly memorable, my favourite literary image has always been Barbara Cartland stomping around her Hertfordshire manor spluttering her romantic fiction finger food into a cassette recorder.

Her hapless personal assistant, or perhaps it was a team of hapless personal assistants, then had to somehow lash this psychobabble into a book.

And there were a lot of books.

Barbara Cartland, we should be constantly reminded, is the biggest selling author of all time, with sales of over one billion.

As the cataract clouding over my one working eye reached a sobering nadir four weeks ago and left me able to type only with difficulty and unable to then see what I had typed, even in 26pt verdana bold, I began to think Barbara Cartland was my only answer.

I would have to learn how to write by talking in mid-air.

And, of course, relying heavily on a hapless personal assistant, my wife.

The cataract is hopefully being dealt to today at Dunedin Hospital, fingers and thumbs crossed, so back in mid-May, when the eye went down, I had five of these columns to write.

As Barbara Cartland was always going to be the last resort, I went first to speech recognition software.

There was an old version of one of these programs still on the computer.

I vaguely remember installing it and being so keen to see how it worked, I skipped impatiently through the voice training - the process by which you teach the little person inside the computer to recognise your tone and inflections.

I think I was required to read an excerpt from Alice In Wonderland for 36 minutes.

Maybe there were other excerpts for succeeding days.

I read for three minutes and stopped.

The results were predictably polycomprehensible.

I sent an email to my editor at the Listener using my new language, and he immediately demanded a column assembled in this way.

The idea was a good one.

But the reality was a sub-editor's nightmare - which errors belonged to me, and I was known for errors at the Listener, and which to the badly-trained speech recognition software.

I never sent the column.

I then had a play with the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking, but I was wary of it.

Even if I could follow the voice training and setup instructions, with the help of my hapless personal assistant, I would still be at the mercy of modernspeak, all those appalling new words that thoughtless teenagers have somehow managed to have instilled in the English language.

I am old school.

I could foresee myself saying clearly to Dragon Naturally Speaking how much I enjoyed listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, and having it come up on the screen, middle finger metaphorically raised, as Rap City In Blue.

So I just leaned over the keyboard with a bedside lamp beaming down on the keys and slowly stitched the columns together the old way.

I don't touch type, but 40 years of two-finger jabbing has taught me pretty much where the keys are, the trick was just to hit the first letter of a word correctly.

Occasionally though, I would start one key to the right.

But the hapless personal assistant quickly twigged to this, and while a word like "esyrtjrsf" would have paralysed a newspaper subeditor, my wife quickly twigged it was "waterhead".

A hapless personal assistant is worth her weight in gold.

The corrected first draft column was then read out, and I made changes in mid-air, changing my mind every five seconds, shouting out changes impatiently and demanding a read-back even before they had been typed.

It was the closest I got to pure Cartland, and it certainly wasn't easy.

I have a new grudging respect for this woman I have been impugning all my life, her absurd morality, her pink frocks.

And I have Vesuvian respect for her personal assistants.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

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