A childhood learning calligraphy under Ditchling’s famous artists, a spell as a monk, employment as a consultant in a top Californian research facility… Ewan Clayton will be the first to admit his is an unusual career path.

But it has provided him with the perfect background to write his first book, The Golden Thread, a weighty tome that tells the history of writing from the primitive shapes of Ancient Egypt to the drop-down computer menus of today.

Writing has played a key role in Clayton’s life since his school years, when his struggles to construct letters saw him put back in class.

Determined to improve, his family introduced him to members of Ditchling’s famous craft guild.

It was his discovery of calligraphy that changed everything. Under the tutelage of Edward Johnston – now regarded as the father of modern calligraphy – he discovered that something as ordinary as writing could be made to look beautiful.

When he also gained the respect of his peers through his newfound skills – he remembers swapping his first piece of calligraphy with a classmate for a 3D postcard – it marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair.

Today he is a distinguished calligrapher who has exhibited and taught all over the world and continues to play his part in Ditchling’s rich artistic tradition through his workshop in the village.

In his late 20s he developed cancer, which led him to re-evaluate his life and he went on to become a monk at Worth Abbey near Crawley; “Oddly enough, being a monk had been my childhood ambition and I realised it was something I needed to try. I loved it but it’s a demanding and lonely life.

There’s nowhere to hide in a monastery and you quickly realise how much you rely on familiar defence systems.”

It proved a valuable experience for his artistic as well as personal development as he was tasked with drawing banners and orders of service for the monastery.

“Monastic calligraphy is the complete opposite to what you’d imagine; you’d think you’d have all the time in the world and be able to complete work thoughtfully and perfectly but people are relying on you and you just have to get things done. If the service is at 11am and it’s 10.30am, you have to finish the order of service however you can. It taught me not to be an absolute perfectionist and gave me the freedom to fail, which is really important because it means you take risks and taking risks is how you develop.”

When he eventually left the monastery, Clayton was thrust dramatically back into the modern world when he was taken on by Xerox’s PARC research facility in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.

He joined a team of philosophers, lawyers and linguists all attempting to define the way Xerox’s technology should be applied.

His experiences as a monk proved surprisingly useful in this new chapter.

“Research is about facing the unknown. You don’t know what you’ll discover and if you try to invent safe solutions or take the most obvious route you don’t get the best answer.

“You have to be comfortable with a degree of unknowing and the monastery was like that too. To be a monk is a calling to look for answers rather than assuming you already know them.”

The Golden Thread is the culmination of all this experience and learning, published at a time when the development of new technologies has led to huge and significant changes in the way we communicate.

While books have been published that explore the history of a particular type of writing (Simon Garfield’s Just My Type, for example), Clayton’s is the first to look at writing as a whole.

“These are exciting times and as things continue to change at a considerable pace I suppose I wanted to bear witness in some way.”

* The Golden Thread is out now, published by Atlantic Books, priced £25.

*To find out more about Ewan Clayton visit his website, www.ewanclayton.co.uk