Or, if you already can, teach someone else. Or urge them to learn, courtesy of some friendly computer programme like Mavis Beacon.

None of you will ever regret it. One of the great blights of the new keyboard age is that because of ancient 1970s’ snobbery about “typists”, not enough educated, professional people can type accurately and fast and without looking down. Educational apartheid meant that for decades, anyone considered bright enough to go to university was regarded as too grand to learn touch-typing. Hence generations of journalists, authors, executives, doctors and teachers were still pecking away with two fingers as the keyboard era dawned in a glory of email and word-processing.

And instead of using their heads and saying“Right - this is the moment to unlearn the old inefficient habit and use all eight fingers”, they bury their head in the sand and carry on pecking. Meanwhile, Mavis Jones from the Secondary Mod, who trained on old Remington manual uprights in 1962 , can sit merrily down at the lovely new keyboards and rattle off letters, emails and bestselling novels while the intelligentsia fiddle around giving themselves RSI and ignoring the ergonomic marvel which is the standard QUERTY keyboard.

Millions of hours are wasted by this nonsense. And, shockingly, very few schools think it worth their while to encourage children to touch-type. The national curriculum prefers getting them to design disgusting pineapple pizzas in Food-Tech, or acquire waffly “key skills” without ever remembering to include the keyboard one.

I was lucky. In an otherwise appalling year at a bigoted, violent convent school in the old South Africa, I found that girls were expected automatically to learn to type: not because anybody foresaw the computer age, but because in that culture being a“sekketery” before marriage was the natural destiny of anything with a womb. Moreover, as a foreigner I was allowed to skip Afrikaans lessons, so I got extra time in the Typing Room to practise. The machines were upright, ornate as old sewing-machines, with a heavy touch which required you to bring down your whole hand with a crash, correct fingers poised. You put a check duster over your hands - I can still feel it now - positioned your little fingers on the a and the colon, and consulted a diagram above your head while struggling through “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” - initially taking 10 minutes over it, then, as the brain became programmed to associate letters with movements, advancing joyfully towards a fluency as beautiful in its way as any Chopin prelude.

It even improved my spelling. Every new word or name, to this day, causes my fingers to drum out the spelling on any handy surface, imprinting it on the mind by physical movement. Coming home from Johannesburg after a year, I was given my father’s old portable typewriter. Five years later it came to university with me, and wrote all my essays, letters, poems and Union speeches. It doesn’t make you think any quicker, but to be able to type out quotations or second drafts without looking away from the source saved endless time . Later - thanks to articles written on the faithful old portable, and to spells spent as a temp audio-typist in various offices - I could afford an electric typewriter and less flat fingertips. And so, eventually, to the computer keyboard.

I have not looked down while writing this: I have thrown my head back, looked at the birds outside the window, and abolished any grammatical infelicities and awkwardnesses spotted on the screen in front of me, without having to peer down.

My hands are not tired, nor my shoulders tense. It is a most basic, useful, life-enhancing skill. Moreover, for us duffers at other physical skills like cooking, DIY and playing the violin, it provides great self-esteem.

The only time the old reflexes let me down badly was during a gap-year spell knocking out letters in a German bank. The Germans - because they use zum and zu and are not fond of the letter“y” - transpose Y and Z on their Querty keyboards, so all my letters ended with a broad Somerset accent, Zours Faithfully. But I daresay the bank’s customers got used to it.

So go for it. Make it the 2002 resolution. At first it will slow you down and make you cross. After a week of evenings practising, you will start to feel it coming. Persevere, and it will change your life.

Urge it on your gap-year children. Start a prize award in your school. Come back, Miss Jones. You’re beautiful!