In the petulance of the moment, the new king of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms, was the most relatable he has ever been. A viral video of Charles III, frowning at hands stained with ink that had escaped the confines of a fountain pen, rings true for precisely this reason: Who hasn’t, as a child and/or an adult, fallen victim to the malfunctioning fountain pen, its ink smearing all over the writer’s hands and face? No doubt many commiserate with the new king in this time of great irritation. A monarch, by definition, cannot be “one of us”, but his “God, I hate this pen” and “every stinking time” was the closest Charles III has come to being one of the great unwashed.
The fountain pen is a peculiarly frustrating relic from the pre-keyboard/pad analogue years. It is, perhaps, no longer so widely used as it once was for its original purpose, that is, writing. It is used now instead more to signal something about the user — often their status, sometimes their “seriousness”. And the more expensive a pen, the likelier the chance that its only purpose in this world is to nestle in the breast pocket of a custom-tailored suit, from where it can announce its presence with a slowly growing and hard-to-remove ink stain.
In fiction, of course, the fountain pen has done double or even triple duty as a spy cam, recorder and weapon (Q’s exploding pen from GoldenEye being the most notable example). In real life, such things are unnecessary frills. All that the long-suffering public demands — including Charles III — is a pen that is utterly and under all circumstances, leak-proof. Is that too much to ask?
