The fountain pen, complete with leaky nibs, bursting cartridges and indelibly stained shirts, is making a compulsory comeback in a last-ditch attempt to save the nation's handwriting.
The spread of vowel-free text messages among the young and the rise of grammarless e-mails across all age ranges is leaving children, university students and even teachers unable to write legibly by hand.
But now a leading independent school in Edinburgh has ordered pupils aged nine and over to write only with fountain pens.
I remember my first fountain pen, it was a chunky black
bakelite Osmiroid pen and I was eight.
It came in a little cardboard box and had one nib and no ink. I think ink colour in those days was limited to blue or black - what did puzzle me was the choice of washable blue or permanent blue. They seemed the same to me - they certainly behaved the same! Filling my first pen was awkward - there was a skinny rubber tube you had to squeeze while you dipped the nib into the ink bottle. Cleaning the residue wasn't any easier ... the school toilet paper was useless, (it was the shiny scratchy stuff) - I used to blot my nib on a corner of a jotter and by the end of term there was hardly a free space to dry your nib!
At the age of 10 I graduated in penmanship and moved onto cartridge pens - do kids still use them? Do you remember your first pen?
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