damerell

I got my first ever fountain pen for a birthday present when I was about eight, and my brother pencil-sharpened it before I ever used it.

In primary six, our teacher made us get cartridge pens and use them for "handwriting practice" sessions.

They. Always. Leaked.

In P7 and all the way through senior school, we were expected to use pens, but any old pens - which invariably meant biros.

We had to use an ink pen, but could choose whether to use one with insertable cartridges or a fill-from-a-bottle one. As for why, well - they are a lot smarter than a Biro.

I used ink cartridges initially, blue or black, then someone gave me a bottle of orange ink and a proper re-fillable fountain pen, so I used that for a while. After I used up the orange ink I found that you could buy coloured cartridges, so I bought green, turquoise, and purple and used those (I had three different pens, otherwise the ink from the previous cartridge tinted the current cartridge).

If I want to write something nicely (like a wedding card or something) I still use a cartridge pen these days, with black ink. I like one with a nice wide soft nib; I have won several with gold nibs which are excellent.

Fountain pens were obligatory at one of my four schools. We had the choice of cartridge or reservoir, though.

Since my writing style is best described as "left-handed with my right hand", fountain pens suited me extremely badly. Nowadays, my preferred writing implement is a fine-point disposable Bic (the yellow-barrelled ones) with black ink.

There were no rules about pens at the schools I went to. In high school I used Parker Vector (http://www.parkerpen.com/en/discovery/range/performance/vector) pens—cheap enough that I could afford to buy them, but pleasant to write with. I also had a rotring isograph (http://www.rotring.com/en/produkte/technisches_zeichnen/isograph.html) for drawing graphs and diagrams. If you're an engineer type it's natural to be interested in the tool you're using, and if you do a lot of handwriting then that's your pen (just as if you do a lot of typing then you pay attention to your keyboard).

In those days rollerballs were only just starting to get good, so if you wanted a pen that was more pleasant than a ballpoint then it had to be a cartridge or fountain pen. But now rollerballs are good enough and I use Pilot Hi-tecpoints (http://www.pilotpen.eu/index.php?id=195&tx_ttproducts_pi1[pid]=195). When I write at all, that is, which is very rarely now.

We had to write in pencil until Junior 2, aged, what, nine? And after that it had to be fountain pens while we learned to do proper joined-up writing, biros striclty banned for the rest of juniors, but once we got to seniors at 11 then you could use what you liked, but I liked fountain pens.