The dying art of owning a decent pen

‘I’m afraid you do not like your pen,’ says Miss Bingley to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. ‘Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.’ You know then — if you didn’t suspect it already — that Mr Darcy could never marry Miss Bingley. Is there anything so maddening as someone interfering with one’s pen?

‘Could I borrow your pen for a moment?’ they ask as they jot down a shopping list or scribble a booking reference. ‘No!’ you want to scream in possessive anguish. ‘It’s mine!’ They are sure to split the nib, chew the end, absentmindedly tug the clip that fixes it to the front of your diary. That’s if you do get it back. The chances are that they’ll pocket it, unthinking, and that’s another pen lost to a scrounger. The late architect Zaha Hadid used to cut a pen-shaped groove out of the middle hundred or so pages of her sketchbooks and hide a pen in there like a skeleton key in a spy story.