When I was a kid, about 9 or 10, my mother taught me to type. As a teenager, she had gone to secretarial college and had become a legal secretary typing up documents for lawyers before getting married.

I learned on a manual typewriter. I was the weird kid who typed up school reports on a manual typewriter before computers were widespread.

Along with basic sewing, it's one of the most useful things my mother taught me. We should teach every schoolchild to touch type.

It was incredibly embarrassing at the time, but I'm very grateful to have learned touch typing.

I taught myself on a life size printed version of the Sinclair Spectrum that was part of the promotional materials, I was gutted when I found out that coding on the real thing required a bizarre set of keyboard combinations unrelated to QWERTY... the skills have come in handy in the following decades though ;)