I've had an unpleasant experience with a smashed biro today . I don't know how it actually broke, but I do know that ink is a nightmare! The desks in my schooldays did have inkwells, but they weren't used by our day - although we had a few mishaps with fountain pen cartridges - and I am very glad of that . My dad once managed to spill ink over an exam paper when he was at school.

I'm amazed that there weren't more ink-related disasters in the books. There are a couple in the Tyrolean books, and Kathie gets ink all over her blazer in one of the Swiss books, but I think that's about it. Biro ink seems a lot thicker and stickier than fountain pen cartridge ink, so maybe it's particularly bad, but I never want to see it outside a biro again!

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

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Isn't there an ink accident on the Island when they are setting up do to exams outside? Which must have been a nightmare for hayfever sufferers....

During changes I believe - around the time of the pigs in the orchard

And yes hayfever sufferers must have hated it - although I believe it tends to be lower pollon counts on the coast so a small island would probably be one of the best places

I've always been a 'chewer' - fingernails, pencils, pens.....once, aged about ten, I sucked the end of a biro and the little plastic cap came off and my mouth got filled with the ink. I suppose it didn't help that it was red ink! I honestly never noticed this happen, but carried on sucking he pen and reading through what I had written, until the girl on the next desk saw me and started screaming. She thought I must be bleeding to death, as the ink was all around my mouth by that time.

Thankfully the teacher in class quickly realised what had happened and somehow got it all cleaned away - except for my teeth, randomly, which needed a good few brushes before I stopped looking like a vampire

One of the girls, Bride I think, gets ink on her dress and Julie and the others have hysterics, and Matey comes out and yells at them.

Doesn't someone get drenched in ink in the Tyrol books? What a nightmare it must have been to get out of your clothes!

There's more than one ink-spilling incident, actually - Evadne and Violet upset an inkwell and spatter Cyrilla in And Jo, and I think there's another - but the worst one must have been in School At when Bernhilda spills red ink on herself and Grizel.

And Jo was also when Frieda spilt the paste - Stickphast, I believe!

There is also The Robin being naughty in Rebel/Lintons (depending on which version you have) with ink and mixing chalk in it which leads her to be send to bed early all week.

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Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary – it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.
William Boyd//Any Human Heart

In Changes Bride says that it is 'school ink' and not permanent. I'm well after the schooldays of using ink pens of any sort, but I assume that 'school ink' existed?

I think it was Julie who got most of the ink spilled on her (she sat on a portable desk which wasn't set up correctly and it held a lot of inkwells), but some of the other prefects were splashed too.

When I was at school and using fountain pens, there were 2 sorts of ink generally available 'washable' and 'permanent' [as well as 'Indian ink' which was even thicker and more permanent]. The ink provided in school inkwells was 'washable' - but it wasn't that easy to wash out, and always left a pale blue stain that admittedly faded with each subsequent wash. We weren't allowed to use permanent for normal school work.

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to be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e.cummings
http://stitchwords.blogspot.co.uk

Fountain pens, eh Ruth? When I started at secondary school we were still using wooden penholders with removable nibs - you dipped them in the inkwell in your desk.

Nasty things they were too. We were not allowed to graduate to fountain pens until we were considered to be writing tidily enough with the other....

The ink was a nasty colour known as "Blue-black". The worst of both ....

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Cestina's dolls houses - Just the Right Shoe

At junior school we had dip pens for a while until we were proficient. But for my secondary school we were required to have our own fountain pens - which had, of course, to be properly labelled with ones name....

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to be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e.cummings
http://stitchwords.blogspot.co.uk

I hate the pens we used at school because, being left-handed, I always got ink smeared on my hand and I'd smudge the page as I was writing.