This is the second part in a three-part pen-based autobiography. Part 1 is here and Part 3 is here.
Age: 11
Pen: Parker Jotter
Ink colour: blue
Comments: Moving to secondary school requires a more serious type of pen. Bye bye Berol. The Parker Jotter was apparently the first ballpoint pen marketed by Parker, and over 750 million have been sold. Having said that, I think Parker have slightly overestimated how iconic the Jotter is:
The Parker Jotter is a design classic and a household name, preferred the world over for its quality, durability and great value for money. It’s popular, dynamic and personifies the social side of writing with bright, lively colours and a practical, simple shape. Fun and friendly, anytime, anywhere – Jotter is the perfect Parker companion.
The Parker website also has an incredible writing simulator, which allows you to choose a “postcard”, select whether you want a fountain pen, roller ball, ballpoint or pencil, and then write a little message:
Look at how I avoided writing swear words. Are you proud of me? I’m always amazed those little pads that people use to test new pens in Ryman aren’t just covered in obscenities. Well done Britain. I once had a vague idea of collecting those bits of paper from Ryman. I thought it’d make a nice little website or something. But then I couldn’t be bothered.
Age: 12
Pen: Parker Frontier
Ink colour: black
Comments: My second Parker, the Frontier. After a year of using the Jotter, I wanted something which combined the conservative tradition of Parker but was also more forward-thinking. I wanted to push the boundaries, while at the same time, building on the expertise I had gained. Something contemporary, distinctive and dependable, with more than a hint of style. Fortunately, the Frontier was ideal:
An intriguing mixture of the conservative and the forward-thinking, Frontier brings Parker quality to people who want to push the boundaries – but who know the value that comes from expertise. With a unique blend of durable, soft-touch materials and smooth, lustrous finishes, it’s contemporary, distinctive and dependable – with more than a hint of style.
It was also around this time that I switched to black ink. It seemed like a more logical partner for a sheet of white paper. Black and white. Like the words on this page, like the words in a newspaper, a book, pretty much any written material. It added authority to my words, words which needed authority as they had none of their own.
Age: 13 to 15
Pen: Bic M10 Clic
Ink colour: black
Comments: After a couple of years of Parker pens, I realised that, actually, they’re not all that impressive. I wanted something more simple. One day, in Folwers Stationers (117 Central Road, Worcester Park), I spotted something I had never seen before – a Bic M10 Clic. I had imagined that this was a brand new innovation in pen design, although actually it appears the M10 was launched in 1956, almost forty years before I discovered it in Fowlers that fateful day. Soon, I had the full set – black, blue, red and green. Although I abandoned blue, it was still useful for labelling diagrams. So was green – indeed this appears to be the only situation in which it’s considered acceptable to use green ink. I was always led to believe that green ink was traditionally used by finance people for some reason, and anyone else who used it was immediately labelled a lunatic. I’m not sure if this association with insanity has anything to do with this:
Age: 16 to 24
Pen: Bic Cristal
Ink colour: black
Comments: From the M10, I moved to the Cristal. It was at this point that my relationship with stationery connected to a wider aesthetic, an ideology. Studying Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, I began to appreciate the iconic beauty of everyday objects. I began to want to surround myself with the most definitive versions of things. If I was thirsty, I’d drink Coke (though I preferred Pepsi). If I was hungry, I’d eat a Big Mac (though I preferred Chicken McNuggets).
Richard Hamilton inspired cover of this book which I have never read, but it looks quite good.
It was a way of avoiding having to make decisions, I could be totally passive and surrender myself to the collective will of society. I read Duchamp. Eno. Perec. Venturi. I became interested in automation, industrialisation, Fordism, globalisation. “Ugly and ordinary” instead of “heroic and original”. I found boring things interesting (“I like boring things”).
It was obvious then that I would choose the Bic Cristal (even if, secretly, I preferred the Staedtler Stick 430M – see below). Over a hundred billion sold. A design classic, included as part of the Museum Of Modern Art’s permanent collection. What other pen, other than the Bic Cristal could be used for something like this?
This is my desktop wallpaper.
Age: 25+
Pen: Staedtler Stick 430M
Ink colour: black
Comments: Of course, that kind of aesthetic militancy can’t last forever. Eventually, you leave school, leave university, get a proper job, settle down, mellow out. With me, this took the form of feeling relaxed enough to give in to my true desire and switch to the Staedtler Stick 430M. Just look at that strong silhouette, classic German design.
I feel more comfortable in myself now – although, tragically, this feeling of ease was reached at the same moment that both the trajectory of my life and the development of technology coincided, with the result that I now write on a computer more than I do by pen.
Green ink is also traditionally used by the head of Mi6. Even current ‘C’ still writes his memos in green ink, according to a recent Radio 4 documentary.
Our friend @amisanthropist may be able to tell you more.
Yes, Wikipedia says that Mansfield Smith-Cumming, first director of MI6, used to mark each memo he had read with a “C” in green ink. Maybe at work from now on, I should print out each email I get and mark it with a “W” in green. Although if I did this, quite soon afterwards, someone else would come along and add “ANKER”.
I see no mention of the fountain pen anywhere. Why is this? I could understand a dislike of the average 99p fountain pen which constantly leaks, but the Parker fountain pens never did. Was the changing of the ink too much of a hassle? That was the most exciting part for me. Was it the waiting of the ink to dry? A fountain pen has the chance to become a long-term pen that you really look after. I still have my Parker from school as I could never bring myself to part with it.
It could be that bad experiences with cheap fountain pens have clouded my view of them as a whole, but to invest in a quality fountain pen seems like too much of a leap of faith. Too much of a commitment. They always seemed scratchy too, unlike the smoother ball point (it has a ball in the point!). The one advantage to them that I could see was that if you made a mistake, you could use those magical double ended correction pens which made the ink disappear and then you flipped them over and rewrote over the top with the other end.
The eraser pens were definitely handy, if a bit shabby. No matter how long you left the paper to dry out, the corrective ink was a poor substitute and stuck out like a sore thumb. It sometimes looked neater to just rule a line through the mistake. I understand about your bad experiences with the cheap ones – for a whole school term I had a blue patch on the inside of my middle finger – but after receiving a fancy one as a Christmas gift, I was hooked. I’m thinking of going to university next year and am quite excited by the idea of digging out the old Parker.
I’m really enjoying this blog though.
What are your thoughts on mechanical pencils? They were really handy in Graphics lessons, but overall, I’m not a huge fan. They made me too anxious.
Jenna, I studied architecture at university, so mechanical pencils played quite a large role in my life for a few years. I didn’t mention this in either Part 1 or 2 of My Life In Pens for the sake of narrative clarity. I might add an appendix after Part 3 called “Other Pens I Have Known”.
How did mechanical pencils make you anxious? Was it not being able to tell exactly how much lead remained?
It was more the fear of pressing too hard and that awful feeling when you’ve snapped the lead. Of course, you always had the same problem with your bog standard wooden pencil, but these mechanical ones weren’t the most durable of things, and the slightest wrong move and it was gone. They were expensive to replace too, so I always hated the wasting element. Maybe I’m just a big fat-handed tw@t who can’t use a pencil properly.
The key is to only click out a small length of the lead at any one time. I’m not sure if “click out” is the correct phrase (having just made it up) but I quite like it.
Possibly, just like fountain pens, mechanical pencils require a concentrated leap of faith which unless it’s backed up with a specific reason (a Christmas gift, an architecture course) is never going to materialise.
Dear god, I love the Bic M10 Clic! I drive anyone around me doolally with constant clicking, though – it’s so addictive!
Of course, buying a new Bic M10 Clic, you’d have to check it quite closely in case there was a bubble of air trapped in the little bit you push to expose the nib. That would ruin the whole experience.
I am a little disturbed to realise that I also used every single one of those; however you obviously were not reliving my life (as I first thought) as I did spend a number of years writing in purple ink with a succession of cheap fountain pens. If using green ink means you are a lunatic, what does purple ink make me?
I can only guess it makes you some sort of goth.
I don’t understand how there can be a part 3 to this, after the Staedtler Stick 430M. I am 32 and it is all aspire to in life, pen-wise. I love it and have been known to raid shops when I thought there was a shortage. I also bring my own to the office, a bit of class to contrast the cheap Niceday (what an irony!) biros they supply us with.
Part 3 will be titled “Pens Of Today, Pens Of Tomorrow”. The Staedtler Stick 430M still features, but there are other pens I use too.
Green ink is the required colour when making comments as an Internal
Verifier on ESOL assessments (there is a stock of green ink ball-point pens in the stationery cupboard, if you’re lucky).
Is there a reason they chose green?
Each script would have writing by the student and the initial marker, then a selection would have comments by the Internal Verifier, and a selection of the selection would be seen by the External Verifier, so I imagine the choice of green ink is to differentiate the markers. I just did what I was told. It was a bit of a thrill, actually, to have a go at using green ink in an officially sanctioned activity.
I wonder if after that point, they decided they had built a sufficiently rigourous system which would prevent cheating in any form, or if they just ran out of colours.
Either after rigorous and extensive research it was found that green was statistically the colour of ink least likely to be used by the student, or the person who devised the system was suffering from paranoid delusions. One of the two.
I don’t think Green Ink is a Finance thing at all – unless I have been missing something in these past 25 years of my working life. The only excitement with regards to colours in accounts is the black ink for a debit (positive) and the red ink for a credit (negative) – and before the advent of colour printers it was all in black (with negative/credit figures in brackets). (Sorry for the over-use of the brackets.)