I’ve been struck how many cliched images there are around to represent different professions. I’ve worked as a teacher and as a milkman, and it’s still common for these jobs to be represented by dated stereotypes.

Teachers are usually spectacle wearers, standing in front of a blackboard—t’s not unusual for them to be wearing mortar boards and even gown, at least in clip art. Milkmen invariably have a work coat and a damned silly peaked cap and are toting a wire cage bottle carrier. I ran my milk-round in the 1980s, rarely used the carrier, preferring to use the pockets of my coat to hold bottles, and I never saw the caps which milkmen still wear in commercials and advertisements.

(not me!)

I can just recall some teachers wearing mortar boards and their graduation caps at my grammar school in the 1960s, but it was a posh sort of place and the regalia was reserved for official ceremonies.

(Also, not me!)

Writers are often symbolised by being hunched over typewriters. I last used a typewriter in 1995, and I wondered how many authors still do their writing on one.

Even the tangle-haired model on the cover of this ebook How to be a Writer in the E-Age, is about to peck her typewriter with her forefinger.