Writing pen, Muji 5mm

One day, I often tell myself, I’m going to buy a proper pen. A refillable one, with a proper weight and heft. For someone trying to move away from our throw-away culture, I have a disagreeable taste for disposable pens. For a long time, it was the classic Biro; mainly because they were the cheapest, and most widely available, and the least worth getting upset about when they were lost, as they so easily were.

But then I discovered the Muji range of disposable pens, and quickly settled on the 5mm as the one for me. It has what I would describe as a ‘wet’ action, as opposed to the dry and scratchy action of the Biro, making it possible to write quickly and with minimal impress. In fact, the action is so wet that the ink tends to stay in contact with the page, making the words flow quickly and often illegibly; but the main thing is that they flow quickly. Legibility is the job of typewriters and computers.

The 5mm used to have an infuriating habit of drying up while there was still a good two-thirds of the inkstore in the pen; this appears to have been solved by the addition of two small square holes at the lower end of the barrel. It’s surprising that no-one at Muji looked at the Biro, with its famous small circular hole at the midpoint of the barrel, in the first place. But someone obviously had a quiet word, because with the addition of the holes the 5mm now allows every last drop of ink to flow out through the pointed nib.

At which point, the whole damn thing gets thrown in the bin. And buried in a hole in the ground along with the millions of tonnes of rubbish we all keep throwing away.

Craft knife, Swann Morton. Made in Sheffield.

When I graduated from university, in 1998, I went to live in Sheffield. A friend was moving out of a flat there, and offered me his room. It was cheap, and I didn’t have a better plan, so I took it. The flat was a few rooms carved out of the back end of a Victorian church on a council estate near the Sheffield University campus; it was shabby, but the top bedroom had a spectacular arched ceiling and a large rose-window, and so long as we kept it clean people were usually impressed. They started demolishing the council flats soon after I moved in, as part of a regeneration programme, and the air was often thick with brick-dust and the sound of reversing bulldozers. One morning, heading out for work, I found a pile of rubble pushed almost up against our front door. The driver of the bulldozer seemed surprised that anyone was living there.

That was my Year of Manual Labour. I’d decided to become a writer, and wanted to avoid jobs which would take up too much time or mental energy. I also wanted to avoid jobs which didn’t fit with my Bukowski/Kerouac image of how a writer moved through life. I signed up with an employment agency, and travelled all over Sheffield to find short-term jobs in bakeries and warehouses and sorting offices.

At that time, Sheffield was still the Steel City, just about. Out in Tinsley, towards the motorway and the huge wastegrounds of the Don Valley, the streets still narrowed to canyons between towering buildings which were joined overhead by walkways and pipeworks, and the evening sky would still be lit up by flashes of sparking fire. Through open doorways, you could still see, in halls the size of aircraft hangars, steel being rolled and pressed, cut into beams and spars or spun into strands of wire. And in other parts of town, around Kelham Island, or behind Division Street, or in the area around the Leadmill which has now been rebranded as The Cultural Quarter, they were still making things from that steel. Cutlery, craft knives, scissors, tankards, toecaps, jewellery, machine-parts, ball-bearings. There are still, today, small workshops and units where people who’ve inherited generations of skills and knowledge forge, grind, hone and temper some of the best steel-work available anywhere in the world.

I found this particular craft-knife when I moved into an office in Nottingham. It had been empty for a few years; the previous tenants had run a packaging company, and among the invoices and flattened boxes they’d left behind I found this knife, the Swann Morton. It’s a simple one-piece design, with a disposable 10A blade which slots onto the one-piece handle. The circular etchings at one end do a fine job of aiding thumb-grip. The Swan Morton logo is engraved on one side, with a flourish, and stamped in much smaller letters on the other, along with the reassuring and terse marks of “Sheffield. England.”

I don’t have much use for a craft-knife. I tend to use this one for cutting into packets of coffee, or for opening the occasional letter. But I like to keep it about the place. It reminds me that some people still have real jobs.