95. Fountain Pens

Or ink pens. Or cartridge pens, whatever.

The BF might well correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure that our school insisted we use fountain pens for all our work. To a stationery addict with a speciality in pens, this was obviously no problem. The school even issued blotting paper. I would like to point out that I am not 130 years old - this was in London in the mid to late 80s. It was, however, quite an old-fashioned school.

'Duh', you all say.

Working with fountain pens meant having ink permanently on your hands, and quite often on your face and frequently on your clothes. They leaked into school bags and onto any furniture they came into contact with. They always needed refilling at the most inconvenient times and if your brother tried to use them as darts they rarely survived. It amazes me to think that I wrote all my A-level papers with a fountain pen. Three subjects, three papers each, each exam was three hours long. That's a lot of bloody writing. That's a lot of ink.

I have always owned a fountain pen, and at the time of writing I own five:

1) A beautiful silver Caran d'Ache which was a gift to me on my 30th birthday from my sisters-in-notquitelaw. I cherish this pen. It's heavy, and smart and aesthetically wondrous and I feel both clever and interesting with it in my hand. It is the pen I use to write thank you letters and cards and anything with some heart in it. It's ink-thirsty and a bit leaky but if I lost it I would be distraught.

2) A dead posh Parker with a gold nib, bought for me by Herself one Christmas. Another beautiful pen. But I dropped it and the nib is bent. I've been saving up for a replacement - they're VERY expensive.

3) A Lamy, bought for me by the Parent. This is my workaday fountain pen. It goes with me everywhere.

4) Another Parker. Not a posh one, therefore obviously bought by me, for myself. This is what you might call a jotting pen, if you were a twat. It's the pen I use to write telephone messages, practice my 'Mrs Jason Bateman' signature, that kind of thing. You know.

5) Another one of the above. It's broken. But I can't get rid of it. Somebody please help me.

But the pen I love the most is 'The One That Got Away'. My Old Man had a gold Parker he carried about with him wherever he went, with his Smythson diary. It was a truly classic pen - a beauty, heavy, serious. He let me borrow it sometimes, but the nib was moulded to his handwriting so it only really suited him. It should have been mine, his legacy to me, but it didn't come back from the hospital with his things...

I'm not complaining. I got half his genes after all, and his baby blues.

A writer isn't a writer without a fountain pen, is my feeling. If words are your business you need the best possible tools for the job, and a fountain pen is to the writer what the brush is to the artist. Not the only way to do it, but the original, and still the best.