I have always described it as looking like a cross between an old-fashioned cash register, from when I still had my little bit of sight (some 35 years ago now), and a battleship.

Battleship may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek but it is grey (they come in brighter colours nowadays) and also heavily built, to the point of appearing armoured.

My first one travelled all over the country by trunk and train, parcel, post and, more parochially, in my rucksack and lasted longer than a quarter of a century!

"But what is it?" you may well ask.

It is my Perkins Brailler.

In the early to mid-Sixties, when Perkinses were first imported in any significant numbers from the United States, where they were first produced in the early Fifties, they were indeed a huge step forward in personal brailling.

As "upward writers", they allowed you to read your writing straight away, without removing the paper from the machine and turning it over first.

I was one of the last pupils at my specialist secondary school for blind boys to have a Perkins Brailler provided.

That was in 1966. And here I am, writing my October 2001 Heard World column on - yes, you've guessed it - my good old Perkins.

So how do I go about it?

Braille characters are made up of different combinations of six possible raised dots in a "cell" of two vertical lines of three, which we read by touch.

Often, when a sighted person who has never really come across braille before sees me with some of my own brailling, he or she will indicate what looks like a long block of dots and ask what it is.

It is me using all six possible dots in many successive cells to, as it were, "ink out". There are four such blottings out in the first draft of this column so far.

But I can't go back, say several paragraphs to "arrow in" an alteration (that is, to blot something out and then draw an arrow to where I've written the new version). That's when I bring in my second piece of equipment, a cassette recorder.

I might start my redrafting on to cassette when the number of smallish alterations I've been keeping in my head builds up to the level where I think a bit of a rewrite would help me sharpen my focus.

That's partly what I'm doing at this point in the present instance.

But I'm also completely replacing the last paragraph I wrote in braille. I might have brailled the new version before recording it, but this time (and I don't know quite why) I've dictated the last three paragraphs straight onto cassette.

But now it's time for me to get back to braille again. So I'll just wind the cassette back and put a new piece of paper in the Perkins and see what minor alterations crop up as I rebraille to this point.

And so it continues between braille and cassette (sometimes more than others) until I have a final version recorded. Then out comes piece of equipment number three.

I've never enjoyed typing. I'm not very good at it, particularly since a not altogether successful operation on my left hand which means I can't straighten that hand out properly.

My portable typewriter differs from others of the same model only in its tactile scale.

I do have to use the paper rest to feel when I've come to the end of a page, though.

But once I've typed up from my last recording (including genuinely final, final adjustments), it's over to my wife and her trusty pen to correct my inevitable typos. (I sometimes forget how far I've got in a sentence and repeat myself or miss a bit out).

Then it's off to have it photocopied in case of it going astray in the post.

I could almost still be in the Sixties - not that I haven't tried to catch up with the times.

But that's for a future column.