My fountain pen
Yes I remember life before the ballpoint pen. We had something called a fountain pen. For the record I no longer own one or at least I do not think so. So much mess for a child in school. The secret of the fountain pen was that the ink supply was small. You had to refill your pen during the day. In fact I can remember those little plastic cartridges but you placed inside which made things easy but I also remember dipping the pen into a small jar and pushing on a small lump on the side of the pen until you had pumped up enough ink to make your whole desk into a disaster. We also used special paper. Something the teacher referred to as foolscap although she never explained the why of that word. These are oversized sheets of lined paper where you would place your knowledge in complete sentences with punctuation to be later graded by the teacher. It was an odd time in my life. Ink came in different colours including red black and blue and green. I was never given the chance to get green ink all over everything. I no longer have any of those examination papers. Some things go directly from the desk to the trash. This way of recording dialogue or thoughts is easier. And cleaner. So far I have not had a word spell. There are however odd mistakes. That spell in the previous sentence should have been spill. I did a quick search online and the fountain pen is still a thing. Mainly for the rich and famous. After all the ability to read cursive writing is a skill from a previous time in history. Go ahead. Check with your local school and see if anyone there other than the old teacher in the backroom is still capable of translating what looks like hand tracks into dialogue. And yes I know that people took great pride in their writing skills in the good old days. We are not there anymore. And do not get me started on the whole problem of a pen nib that had been covered in dried out ink. That was not supposed to happen but as students we did not listen to the whole explanation of how to use our pen correctly. If we could get to the point where we could write on a page and then recognize what we had written we felt that we had covered the whole curriculum gloriously.
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