pens

Biros are like cats. They appear unannounced and inveigle their way into your house. Collecting in bags, work surfaces, pockets and coffee tables, they can be as omnipresent as police officers at a football match. Today, I found one nestled underneath my kettle, I’m assuming for warmth. Uninvited, they fool you with just enough ink to get you started on that sentence/your shopping list/the phone number you’re taking down, before fading to an untimely end.

Who buys biros? I’ve never seen anybody purchase one. I certainly haven't but, as I look around my cluttered desk, there they are, silently accumulating, like plastic snowdrift, in my desk tidy. Where did they all come from? Black, blue, red (red? I would never choose red…its the biro equivalent of shouting). And yet, there they sit. Chewed lids, no lids, black pens with red lids, blue pens with black ones, the ones with splodgy ink, the ones with no ink (I never quite get around to throwing those away). Then there’s the yellow Virgin Atlantic pen, a purple Tate pen, a pencil with ‘New York’ and an image the statue of liberty, repeated in a jazzy style, along its trunk. I have been to all these places, true, but I’ve never felt the urge to splurge on customised stationery. What I have done is inadvertently collect other people’s memories. These pens are evidence of other people's lives. Amongst my ill-gotten biros sits one clicky pen. It has ‘White Hart Lane Therapy Centre’ printed on it. I’ve never been to White Hart Lane, let than know seek a therapist there. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to advertise they had, on a pen.

And yet, when push comes to shove, when the bottom line is reached, when the fat lady stops singing and the ball’s in my court, I never seem to have a pen on me. They disappear as mysteriously as they arrive.

“I know I’ve got one in my bag” I say, searching in my portable leather tardis. “Hang on...”

A full five minutes of ‘oh nearly' ‘hang on’ and few false ‘ah-hahs' later, all I’ve managed to retrieve is a hairbrush, my make up bag, an umbrella, my wallet, a bracelet I’d forgotten about, some cinema tickets from last year, my diary, a writing pad (talk about rubbing it in) but no pen. Maybe it went for a walk. But I need to write something down. What to do? I lean across to a person sitting near me:

“Excuse me, have you got a…?”