Mighty metal mono

For mono Monday I actually looked for something metal and monochromatic today. I present my Parker 45 fountain pen made of stainless steel, plastic and a tiny amount of gold. The gold will only be plate I'm sure so not a lot at all...

At primary school and then grammar school we were forced to write in cursive with fountain pens. Woe betide anyone using a ball point or even worse one of those modern roller ball pens... At university I carried on using cheap Parker fountain pens, but once I finished my first degree I didn't need to write as much thereafter but I did need to type a lot - and interestingly school never taught me to type so it was a good job I had a misspent youth playing with a Commodore 64 and could actually type quite well.

When I finished my second degree I bought myself this Parker 45 fountain pen, pencil and ball-pen set as a present - but since graduating I've almost never used it. I do scribble notes at work all day long on my pad (the background), but I've used random assortments of pens and pencils for decades now.

Earlier this month I realised I've rather a lot of Parker fountain pen cartridges in the stationery drawer, so all of a sudden after decades of not using a fountain pen, I've started to use them for scribbling notes. It's rather fun, though to be honest cursive handwriting isn't suited well to making ad hoc notes and a lot of what I do is partially diagrammatic, but it makes a change from pencil...