Review: A couple of fountain pens

Bowen's teacher was complaining about his writing. My solution was to get a handwriting practice book and then pens and make him practice. He didn't enjoy it though, and the pens get lost a lot.

I remembered my years as a kid in Singapore schools practicing with a fountain pen. Fountain pens can only be held in a particular way, which makes them great for getting everything right. The Pilot Metropolitan was cheap, which is important for something that's going to be handle by a kid. Dropping a fountain pen on its nib will pretty much destroy it.

Well, Bowen didn't like the fountain pen either, but I discovered a very nice property of a fountain pen. Nobody else in the house wanted to borrow one, which meant that my fountain pen could always be mine, and I'd always have a pen instead of constantly losing it. The fine nib is scratchy, and the built-in squeeze converter holds very little ink, so I went in search of a better pen.

I ended up with the Kaweco Classic Sport, also in a fine nib. This pen's a little more expensive, but it writes much smoother than the Metropolitan, and is also much smaller. Unfortunately, the pens don't use interchangeable cartridges, oh well.

What surprised me about the pens is that modern fountain pens seem to be much better than the stuff I had in school. They don't leak, even on airplanes. (I carry a pen to fill out custom forms, and again, it's such an exotic instrument that nobody ever asks to borrow mine)

I have to say that I'm surprised by how nice it is to have a fountain pen. I never would have guessed it.