So I was using the new iPad Pro the other day and was handed the new Apple Pencil. I thought this was a sily name for a stylus but no, it’s the right name. Maybe because it was handed to me before I asked, maybe because my mind was on trying out the Smart Keyboard instead, I said thank you and scribbled something on the iPad’s screen. That’s nice. And then took a moment and a blink realise that it wasn’t paper and I wasn’t holding an actual pencil. This new device is that transparant, is that natural and normal. Immediately.

You know how parcel delivery firms get to sign your name on their touch screen devices and the entire world recognises that no one will ever recognise that scrawl as being yours or anyone else’s? I wrote my signature and it was my signature. It was terrible and awful and embarrassing, but it was precisely my signature.

It’s just that somehow this makes me want to confess to you something about the terrible and the awful handwriting. It makes me want to get something off my chest and maybe even atone for it. Maybe it’s doing that writing on the iPad Pro, maybe it’s the news of Terry Wogan having to miss Children in Need for the first time since the 1980s, but I minded today of my handwriting.

Specifically of my handwriting during Children in Need. I can’t remember the year now but the odds are that it was late 1980s or early 1990s and I got invited to work on Children in Need at BBC Pebble Mill. Can you imagine the thrill of being included at the heart of this in the MIdlands? I was giddy.

All I did was sit in Pebble Mill taking pledge calls. I can’t remember where in the building, I can’t picture any detail, except I can hear the voice of a caller saying she’d pledge £10 if someone would publish her book. There’s a thing with the BBC that everyone pays the licence fee so everyone pays for this service so you can’t be rude or even curt with anyone. But on Children in Need night, she was taking up time that another caller could’ve been using to give us their credit card numbers.

Or in theory they could. My other memory of that first night, apart from a great sense of becoming bone tired by the end of it, is of a producer taking me to one side. Oh, this is decades ago now and the agony of telling you this.

She patiently explained that if we can’t read the credit card numbers, we can’t get money from them. And she patiently explained getting money was the entire point of the charity night. You could bristle at her patiently explaining, you could resent being treated as an imbecile – but I couldn’t disagree that my handwriting was that bad and I deserved every syllable.

There you go. My handwriting cost the BBC some money. Let’s go further: my handwriting lowered the total, stopped Children in Need doing all it hoped. Let’s not go so far as to say that lives could’ve been saved if I my 9 was decipherable from my 7. Please.

I was asked back the next year but they kept me off the phones. Anyway. To donate to Children in Need without risking your credit card to me or any other scribbler, go online here.