For when the cops pull you over for fast writing.

A friend has just reported that her youngest daughter has received her pen licence. I assume this is from school, and not the State Office of Stationery. I hope it is a one-time affair and that she doesn't have to sit for tests every five years to keep it. Her mum is going to take her to the big office store for a new pen today to celebrate. I hope they show her the nice ones - there is nothing better than a new writing instrument. The expensive ones are even better...

I have an expensive one, and about 30 others ranging in price down to pinched from an unattended desk. I keep them in reasonable order - cleaning out dried ink and straightening nibs that have hit the floor more times than the paper.

This all stems from the 4th grade experience in Riondel, British Columbia - home of mountain penmanship - when the provincial government decided that schoolchildren would learn handwriting by the good old methods. I hasten to add that this was 1956 and there were good new methods sold in every stationer's store throughout Canada.

However we were handed a wooden pen holder, a steel nib, and a glass bottle of ink with a cork stopper. Eight years old and issued with a small spear and a container of indelible dye... What could possibly go wrong?

We were taught to suck the nib for five minutes - without swallowing it - to remove the wax preservative that prevented it from rusting until we sucked on it. Then to dip it into the ink pot that was trapped in a hole on the corner of the desk, rotate the paper 15ยบ to the left, and start to make copperplate O's in the lines. Not outside the lines, mind...and no blots were to be made...

In the fourth grade we had just mastered the rudiments of reading and printing with a pencil. I was a little ahead of the class in that my father always gave me a pad of yellow paper to practice drawing and I had control of many of my fingers. Some of the rest were more used to pointed bones or moose clubs. You can imagine the results at the end of the first lesson.

The provincial authorities did not, and apparently could not be convinced that they had made a foolish error. No amount of blue-fingered teachers with haunted looks could move them and we persisted in the folly for a full year. I succeeded in scrubbing myself clean, but that was only completed in 1989.

Note: The following year I moved to Montreal and fountain pens. Say what you like about Quebec ( but say it in French, or you'll cop a fine... ) they at least know what a fountain pen looks like.

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