Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Yada Yada Yada.

We wrote, once, on rock. Also mud, sand, silt. By a stream, one of us created a half-moon with small white stones picked from the water. Another took a burning stick from the fire and waved it through the air, sending out vanishing circles, squiggles and strokes into the dark. (These lasted longer in our eyes, which store impressions of their own.) Next morning, after a night when no one slept because we were too hungry, angry at each other, someone drew a deer-like beast in the ash.

We buried our ideas in preservative clay, and hired librarians for their muscles. Three strong men could move a whole book from shelf to table. A scholar asked for the wrong one but felt he had to read it anyway.

We visited the Roman fora to read that city's daily newspaper, the Acta Diurna, a publishing project of Julius Caesar. Some of us only read the arts section, others only the crime. It was hard, time being money, to read each article all through. At the end of every day, soldiers tore the sheets from the wooden posts.

As pilgrims, we carried paper to far-away marble pillars in order to copy their carved wisdom. The paper must be moistened, pressed to the relief letters and dabbed with an ink-soaked cloth. This is two thousand years ago.

We have chopped papyrus, scrawled on birch bark and palm leaves, on bamboo and silk-worm excrement, on rawhide. A young man once etched a poem in wax and thought this made him immortal. So did another.

Now we write in light and read the darkness.

And we do more than that. Before I could wield a pen, my father helped me spray-paint my initials into the dirty, growing wool of a pet Welsh lamb.

Tom Howell knows exactly what we are up to. All our tricks.