Ballpoint Pens

a reply to: kosmicjack

Well, thank you. I wanted something fun, but from the "mind's eye" and real.

It is from the heart.

Back in the days when I was a secondary school pupil, I remember we were forbidden from using biros. We had to use fountain pens. No idea why.

I think it was just some silly, old-fashioned unwillingness to accept innovation and convenience.

Biros were introduced to the British public just after the end of WW2, and I remember that they were everywhere when I was a child growing up in the 60s because they were so obviously better than fountain pens...nobody used fountain pens, everybody used biros, even then.

But educational establishments were probably a little slow on the uptake and preferred to hang on to the coattails of the past. And fountain pens had been the staple writing implement in schools for about a couple of hundred years. So, as a teenage school pupil, I had to use them too...in the 1970s. And we had the old-fashioned desks with the ink wells...

Incredibly retrogressive, when you think about it. It's really surprising how things have changed so quickly and so completely.

It's laughable to imagine a teacher today being particular about the type of pen his pupils write with. If it produced work in good, comprehensible English, he'd be happy with a crayon.