Sheep and goats!

 

There are, as is well known, two types of people in the world: those who find stationery (with an ‘e’ for envelope) endlessly fascinating - and those that don’t.

I am, enthusiastically and terminally, in the first category.

One can speculate about how such fixations develop, and I have thought back to my childhood, and I think that I can see the reasons that I am how I am.

My first ‘remembered’ pocket money was 6d (sixpence in old money or 2½p in the ‘new’) even in those distant days that was not much.  It would have bought me 24 blackjacks, 6 chews or one and a bit sherbet fountains: and it had to last a week.

This is where the lure of stationery comes in.  You could buy drawing pins or paper clips with part of your money and you got lots of ‘things’.  You didn’t ever use them all, but it was a real example of plenty for not very much.  Like staples.

Not every six or seven year-old would ask for a stapler for Christmas - but I did.  And I got one too (my parents probably delighted that a childish wish could be fulfilled at such little expense!) they may have been delighted, but it could not possibly match my ecstasy on owning a grey, sleek, official-looking piece of grown-up machinery.  There was not, it must be admitted, a whole stack of papers that I needed to staple, but the fact that I could if I needed to was the point.  And the further point is that a stapler needs staples, and for a very small outlay you could get a thousand of them.  A thousand!

It was the same with notebooks: lots of pages for small amounts.  It almost seemed a pity to have to write in them.  Which, again if I am fair, I seldom did.  It was the ownership of flickable blank pages that really mattered.

As I grew older I was able to rationalise my addiction into defined ‘necessity’: I needed folders for schoolwork.  And clips.  And pens.  And rubbers.  And Tippex.  And so it went on.

Any new system for stationery organization or display had my attention.  The different folders that I purchased usually had differing configurations of holes for the paper - and that necessitated the purchase of hole punches, and then the purchase of those paper Polos that you stuck around the holes to stop the paper from tearing through over use.

From where I sit typing this I can see two domestic paper guillotines to my right; behind me is a long arm stapler purloined from my last school (with the full knowledge of the senior management team); on a shelf in front, the thermal binder is next to the ring binder; further along is the plastificator, with A4, A5 and card sized plastic sleeves; there is a printer within arm’s reach, to say nothing of the serious table-mounted guillotine that can slice through 500 pages at once.

I have enough pens and pencils (for which, incidentally I have an electric sharpener) to supply a school; I have various small staplers (with staples) and a staple remover; I have post-it notes in many sizes and colours; I have stickers (both festive and plain); plastic rulers, metal rulers, cutters, tape dispensers, Dymo machines (manual and electric) and a bewildering array of magnifying glasses.

I am insatiable in my need for aspects of the stationeryatorial possibilities - even if I have nowhere to put my acquisitions and struggle to find a use for those I already have.  But I don’t smoke and so I am ‘allowed’ a minor aberration or three.

As with watches (I will go into that in another post) I am searching.  Searching for perfection.  In this case the perfect pen.

I much prefer to write with ink through a fountain pen nib and, over the years, Parker, Montblanc and Sheaffer have been purchased and gifted to me.  And I have lost the lot.  Some blotty biros stay with me for years, but give me a decent fountain pen and it will be lost before the ink cartridge empties!

I eventually found a solution that met my inky needs and my propensity to mislay, by discovering the pre-filled disposable fountain pen.  A wasteful extravagance, but one that I embraced.  The nib was a good match for my scribbled writing and seemed to be able to cope with my destructive scrawl through the length of the reservoir of ink, and the smallish cost of the thing meant that it didn’t really matter if I lost it.  This attitude of course encouraged me to buy the things in relative bulk so that I could, as it were, go on finding the ‘lost’ pens in a continuous serendipitous discovery process, before they too were lost in the never ending cycle of my stationery life.

Which brings me to Lidl, or possibly Aldi, but certainly one or the other.  Catalonia, unlike the UK, does not start putting out the ‘Back to School’ merchandise on the first day of the summer holiday, they wait until the calendar indicates that it is only a despairing teacher’s scream away from the start of term.  So, it was in early September that I noted a matched set of pen, roller ball and packet of ink cartridges set out alluringly in one of those impossible to breach plastic bump packs.  “Why not?”, I thought rhetorically, and put one in my basket.

It was only when I got home that I discovered that the design on the barrel of each of the writing instruments, that I had thought to be vaguely Orientally inspired, was actually an open, monster’s claw.  I am going to continue using it in the expectation that other people will, like me, take the graphic to be bamboo rather than something else beginning with the letter ‘b’ related to the gruesome that I can’t think of.

As I am wise in the ways of ink cartridge fountain pens, I knew that while one cartridge was feeding the nib, an extra cartridge should be able to be fitted into the empty space of the barrel.  And it could and was.

I then turned to the rollerball.  And it didn’t work.  And it continued not to work even after some vigorous flicking to get the ink to flow.  Disgruntled I dismantled the pen to find that there was nothing inside.  I mean there was no refill there.  Nothing.  I then realised that the thing actually used the cartridges supplied.

This was a revelation!  It is surely a rule that the refills for rollerballs come complete with ink supply and nib, like the refills for ballpoint pens.  But I also realised that I had never seen an ink cartridge rollerball pen before.  And I further realised that, if a roller ball could work with an ink cartridge - why hadn’t it been done before?  Perhaps it has been done, but for something that momentous to escape my stationery eye would be remarkable.

It must be greed.

It is said that HP printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet. The cost of the printer machine has fallen dramatically over the years, but that it because the companies know that they can make so much more money by customers buying their ink.  Even a cursory exploration on the Internet about how computer printer companies limit the life of the ink cartridge in the printers is easy to find and surely, is little more than theft.  There are, allegedly, chips inside printers that count up the number of copies that you make and, at a number decided by the company, the machine will begin to display error messages urging you to buy a new cartridge, irrespective of whether you actually need one or not, and if you do not buy a new one, then the machine will simply stop printing.

This is yet another example of the planned obsolescence exemplified by the light bulb.  There is one electric light bulb that has been burning continuously for over 100 years and I believe that it had its own website and there is a camera trained on it so those with nothing better to do can stare at a lighted lamp and think about all the light bulbs that they have thrown away because they have ‘blown’.  

It’s funny, too, isn’t it, that modern cars don’t seem to rust like they used to?  New technology has nothing, or little to do with it, manufacturers have known how to make cars rustproof for years, but they got more money by ensuring that expensive welding would be needed after a certain number of years, ensuring too a continual replacement of the vehicles.  And don’t get me started on coffee capsules!

In spite of these examples, and many more, that show the uncaring nature of capitalism and the gullibility of we the consumers, I am still enthralled to know that I now posses a roller ball that uses ink cartridges.

And, in yet another example of how the things around me don’t really change, I couldn’t find it to get a real look at the design.

But it will turn up and it will give me pleasure when I find it.  Though I may not, or indeed, ever really use it.  

But that response is the nature of addiction and I am working on it.  

Sometime or other.

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Resist and Remember!

I am, with difficulty, stopping myself from using the Internet.

It’s not that I am addicted to the damn thing, or that I have to keep accessing it to reassert my essential character or that I need the anonymous accreditation that plugging myself into the world wide web gives, no it’s because it’s all too easy.

It all started with a jingle:

“You’ll wonder where the yellow went

When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!”

              The sort of jingle that has lain supressed for god alone knows how many years and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly springs into the forefront of your brain and then will not let go.  The inane “tune” established itself in my mind and got stuck on repeat.  In a desperate attempt to get rid of it I began to think of other toothpaste commercials from the past.  “Gibbs SR” came and went because there was no tune to it in my memory, though as the first commercial on British TV, with toothpaste and brush embedded in a plastic block of ice, it did provide Media Teachers with a powerful metaphor for the concept of truth in advertising!  The Colgate “Ring of Confidence” briefly surfaced in my memory and then sank back drowned by the repetition of the Peposdent tune.

In desperation I turned to sweets.  I know from excited experience that, apart from physical injuries, there is nothing that people like to talk about with more enthusiasm than “Sweets from the Past”.  And, although I personally might be referencing sweets from sixty-odd years ago, remembering chews, black jacks and sherbet fountains (Barratt's sherbet fountains to be precise, the ones with the liquorish sucking tube) my own wistfulness can easily be matched by eleven or twelve-year-olds reminiscing about the times “When I was in Primary School” as if those were twenty years ago rather than the same number of months!

So, my flittering remembrance lighted on Opal Fruits.  A sweet I never really liked, too chewy and sickly-sticky for my taste, but the advertising jingle still lives on in my musical memory:

              Opal fruits!

              Made to make your mouth water!

              Cool as a mountain stream,

              Four refreshing fruit flavours!

And this is where it gets a bit jumbled.  I think that the “Cool as a mountain stream” is actually a lying line from a menthol cigarette advert, and after the fourth line the individual flavours were lovingly articulated.

The point is, I cannot remember what they were.  They must have been citrus, so lemon and orange should be two of them.  I thought that it might be banana as the third, but that is hardly refreshing.  Lime? hardly.  Strawberry is always popular, or black current or black berry or some woody fruit.

I know that I can type in Opal Fruits and all will be revealed.  I will probably be able to hear again the original adverts on You Tube.  There will be original packets for sale on eBay and Amazon will probably deliver them to my door.

But I refuse to take the easy way out.  I lived through the introduction of these sweets, I am sure that I had my favourites and spurned the “unfashionable” ones.  But, what were they?

And if I look them up will what I find out be a refreshing of my memory or the creation of a false one?  Will I truly remember, or will I convince myself that I do?

If you study with the Open University you are encouraged to be a wide ranging as possible with your range of electronic references, but the Powers That Be in the institution caution you against Wikipedia, like God Almighty warning Adam and Eve about the Serpent.  We are told that we Cannot Trust It, beware, we are told, of the Blandishments of Easy Knowledge from something that seems so guilelessly and gratuitously munificent.

The end result of course, is that we all (ALL) use it, but then look around for something more academically reputable to back up what it told us.

So much of the Internet is not really trustworthy.  My own experience of using a range of totally authoritative websites gave contradictory factual information, and don’t even get me started on my Sisyphean task of finding out the ‘correct’ punctuation in a line of Clare’s poem ‘I am’.  I rapidly came to the conclusion that the only way in which I could be truly satisfied was to see the original manuscript and I discovered that it hadn’t been digitalized and wasn’t on line.  I had various books of poetry in which the poem occurred, but there was not consistency about the way in which it had been written and, to this day, I remain unsatisfied.

It reminds me of the time when I was studying for ‘O’ Level Art in which there was, thank god, a whole History of Art Paper (On Which I Could Get Marks) and which partially compensated for my lack of artistic ability on the other two practical papers.  I had begun to buy Art Books and I realized that I had various copies of Turner’s “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth”.  I laid all these books on my bed, open at the painting and marvelled at just how different they all were.  It was not just the colours, though those were spectacularly different - it was how the publishers chose to size the painting, how they cropped it.  Few of the books actually gave the dimensions of the painting, and fewer still gave you the materials used.  Mostly, it doesn’t matter too much, but in the academic world it matters a lot.

Let me wrench you back to Opal Fruits – which may well still exist as far as I know.  My memory fails to bring too much back.  How can I be sure that anything that I gain about them from electronic media might be absolutely true or absolutely false.  How will I know?

Perhaps TIAT (Take It As True) is now a state of mind for us all.  The musty old libraries full of authoritative books have been superseded and we have instant, overwhelming information flows of truly questionable authority that we perhaps question too little.

Do you remember the flavours?

And, no, I still have not gone to the Internet.  At least not for that.