"Terry Casey" wrote in message
...
These days, my handwriting is terrible!

Lack of practice, I suppose.

I've tracked down my fountain pen for use when I have to fill
in anything important - usually anything I don't have to read
myself!

But then, I've always liked the control that a fountain pen
gives you ...

My handwriting is appalling. It was never very good - one of my first school
reports referred to the quality of my handwriting which was atrocious,
except that my parents and I had great difficult reading what the English
teacher had written on my report :-)

After a lot of practice, I got my writing reasonably OK, but at the expense
of being slow: in exams under time pressures it reverted to atrocious.

Since I've used a computer for most of what I write - I rarely write letters
to anyone when emails are easier and quicker to send and receive - my
writing has deteriorated again, so I have to take great care to slow down
when filling in a paper form or addressing an envelope.


I've still got my old cartridge pen. I found true fountain pens, filled from
a bottle of Quink, just too messy, though the smell of that ink takes me
straight back to the Lower Fourth at school, sitting in one of those desks
which had the seat joined onto the desk, and could be slid across the floor
on runners (*). But a cartridge is a good compromise. I prefer an ink pen to
a biro. Water-based ink pens (Pentel, Rollerball etc) are easier because the
ball moves more freely over the page than for a biro.

(*) One of the "masters" (teachers) at school had been a boy there 15 years
earlier and he had a foot in both camps when it came to allegiance, so he
told us how "when I were a lad" they used to all slide their desks-and-seats
towards the front, in unison, whenever the teacher's back was turned. They
did it so gradually that like the legendary "boiling frogs" experiment, the
master didn't notice what was happening, The goal was to have the master
penned into a corner by the end of the lesson :-)