The news that WHSmith is facing closure seemed inevitable. Good stationery may be one of the pleasures of life, but is anyone actually buying much any more? Of course, people will always need pens, string, bubble wrap and so on, yet the heyday of stationery has definitely passed. There was a time, when people still wrote letters to each other or used writing implements as a matter of course, that it was a large part of our shopping, especially if you were a school kid. We wrote in pen and ink (no biros), and for a child of the 1970s or 1980s, this usually meant the choice between a Sheaffer No Nonsense pen, chunky and with a screw-on top, or a Parker 25, stainless steel and, with its ‘stepped down’ barrel, faintly futuristic.
Ink for these – only blue, my school decreed – was provided for us in Bakelite inkwells sunk in our desks.
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