For all the wonderful conveniences of the digital age, some things just can’t be replaced. The exact trappings of the past that people cling to even as technology advances around them vary from person to person, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who prefers scribbling notes on a piece of paper to tapping them into a phone or tablet.

It’s silly, really. I can be doing something that requires me to make a note of something — solving a puzzle in a video game, say — and my phone can be right there next to me but I’ll still get up and go hunting for a pen (inevitably a black biro — a trait I have inherited from my father) and a piece of paper on which to write. There’s something far more satisfying about the scratch of pen on paper than there is for the far less tactile tapping on a touchscreen or finger-painting on a tablet.

And, sorry to say, a piece of paper is infinitely more flexible than any phone or tablet with all the apps in the world installed on it. A piece of paper can be the gateway to your imagination, limited only by its own boundaries — a limitation that can be easily circumvented with additional pieces of paper. A pen or pencil, too, is a far better writing or drawing implement than a fingertip; even tablet styluses are yet to capture the true feel of actually writing or sketching something by hand.

Sure, electronic notes have their benefits. Services like Evernote allow you to categorise and tag your notes for later retrieval, rather than having to rummage through endless reams of paper, some of which have useful notes on while others have nothing more than an array of crudely drawn penises doodled while on the phone to someone boring like a customer service drone for a utility company or anyone involved in government. But sometimes you don’t need that level of permanence. Sometimes you just need to scribble something down quickly to aid in short-term memorising, then to discard it when you’re done with it. For that, it’s tough to beat the old faithful pen and paper combo.

Plus have you ever tried actually handwriting stuff on a palmtop device or tablet? However hard you try, it’s impossible not to make even your neatest handwriting come out like that of a head trauma victim in rehabilitation given crayons for the first time. Sure, you could type it out, but doing that is, in a lot of cases, slower than just picking up a pen and writing it down — plus it doesn’t allow for the flexibility of pen-and-paper notetaking such as being able to integrate both writing and drawing into a single note quickly and easily.

I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that however far technology advances, I never want to be too far away from a pad of paper and a pot of pens and pencils. You may call be a traditionalist, bound by the conventions of the past rather than embracing the future, but I don’t care; there are some things that technology simply doesn’t improve, and I feel this is one of them.