A Paean to the Pen

For Christmas two years ago, my wife Luisa bought me a lovely wooden pen cabinet. I gathered up the various pens that were lying unloved in drawers – and suddenly they became a collection under glass. They all marked significant moments: from my first day at senior school onwards, to success at work, to presents from the people I valued most. Looking at them made me feel a little sad about how they had become relics, as the laptop and smartphone have taken over most of my written communications.

Dipping in the inkwell

A lifetime ago, at junior school my wooden desk featured a real inkwell. And into it I would dip a pen whose scratchy nib dribbled the ink across the desk, before even reaching my exercise book. By the end of every lesson my fingers would be black and smudgy, just like my pages.

The dipping pen – only the brave should apply*

We were taught to do ‘joined up’ writing with these steel and wood instruments of torture – complete with italics. I say we were ‘taught’ to do it. But that implies successful transfer of a skill. Sadly, what was demonstrated by the teacher was a long way from what appeared on my pages. The writing looked like the work of daddy long legs with major coordination problems.

The incontinent ink pens had a benefit enjoyed by many of us – in science lessons. Our teacher, Mr ‘Dingle’ Dann wore a lab coat to protect his clothes from chemicals. It also protected them from the fusillades of ink fired at his back as he walked up and down the classroom.

I wondered what his mother (we were sure he still lived at home) made of the huge dark blots on the back of his labcoat, when she came to wash his clothes.

The ballpoint revolution

Then one day our teacher brought a small cardboard box into the classroom. 

It was full of shiny blue plastic ball point pens – one for each of us. They seemed pure space age by comparison with the old and dirty nib pens. No more messy ink blots. But no actual improvement in writing either. 

In fact our writing got worse. 

The tiny ball enabled your hand to race across the page depositing the blue ink as fast as you could move. So there was no measured thought about shapes or spelling, just a rush to scribble the letters down and move on. And it didn’t matter at what angle you held the pen, the line you traced would always be the same. Until the ink ran out and you simply threw the pen away… 

It doesn’t matter how much you pay for a ball point pen it will always write like a cheap BIC. And maybe your words should be thrown away too.

The beautiful gold Shaeffer ballpoint that I won for hitting my sales target three months in a row

One ballpoint I owned remains meaningful though. In my first field sales job, a gold plated Shaeffer Targa pen was the prize for hitting my target for three consecutive months. When I finally achieved that heady status, I could never leave home for work without that lucky pen in my pocket. On one occasion, sat in my car doing paperwork between calls,  the pen rolled off the top of the dashboard and down inside the air vents. I was horrified. At the next service, the mechanics took the dashboard apart and retrieved it.

It would have probably been cheaper to have bought a new pen.

The fountain pen fights back

My first ‘proper’ fountain pen was a sleek, stainless steel Parker 45. My parents bought me this to mark my move to senior school. 

A nice pen in my blazer jacket felt like part of the uniform. To my nerdy eyes, the shiny chrome Parker arrow clip looked good in my top pocket. And this wasn’t a fancy ball point, it was a proper fountain pen with real ink. 

The beautiful 14K gold nib of a Cross fountain pen

The ink ‘cartridge’ had just arrived for fountain pens, neutralising the danger of carrying around a bottle of ‘Quink’ ink in my school bag. Many a school satchel sported a large, indelible dark stain caused by throwing our bags down with too much studied carelessness.

For reasons of economy and to have more choice of colour, I swapped back to real ink from cartridges. Unaccountably, I convinced myself that turquoise ink looked rather sophisticated. In reality, it caused my teachers eye strain that probably resulted in lower marks. Later at university, I adopted brown ink, in order to give my essays a sepia quality, suggesting the historical provenance of my thoughts…

That had no positive effect on my marks either.

Fine quality pens make very suitable presents.  For this reason, friends and family have bought me a number of pens over the years. And most of them stayed in their silk-lined boxes in the back of a drawer somewhere – until the wooden cabinet arrived to do them justice. 

A quality pen is no longer a writing instrument, it is a luxury gift. It is comparable to a piece of jewellery – more an adornment than a necessity. The pen says more about the relationship between the giver and the recipient than anything you will ever write with it. And no pen maker knows this better than Montblanc, who are able to convince us that their cheapest pen is worth £200.

THE technical drawing instrument

I spent my early teenage years harbouring ambitions to become an architect. 

I was attending an excellent comprehensive school in Luton, where my favourite subject was Technical Drawing.

While pencil was the primary tool, Indian ink pens were vital to producing a vivid black & white technical drawing. And this was when I discovered Rotring, which is unique as both a type of pen – and as a brand. 

Rotring ‘artwork’ by a pretentious 15 year old

Rotring, named after the red ring around the cap, has a very different method to put ink on paper. The Rotring pen uses a needle valve to deliver ink through a hollow iridium-tipped tube. The diameter of the tube determines the width of the line, and you can buy a range of increasingly smaller sizes to suit the fineness of your artwork. A Rotring is more like a hypodermic than a pen.

The german engineering of ROTRING

My Rotring Micronorm pen enabled me to produce technical drawings and at the same time was a lot of fun for fancy lettering and cartoons too.

Sadly, it did not get me far with architecture. A magnificent 18% in my end of term A-level Maths exam put an end to that dream. Maths is more important than artistic skill – if you want to be an architect.

But you could argue that my alternative careers in sales & marketing and training meant I still needed a good pen, and I have continued to enjoy owning and using them.

The last fountain pen I bought was a Parker, like my first proper pen, and it was a Christmas present for my wife. Luisa has beautiful handwriting and uses the pen every day to write her diary. I have never been tempted to read her private words But if I glance over her shoulder as she writes, I catch sight of a lovely script that only a fountain pen can create. It makes me smile.

Yet all these lovely pens, over all these years, have never been able to solve my problem, the one with which I began. I still have terrible hand-writing.

*Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/klytemestra/102588323