A pencil factory for Nigeria. If it really provides employment for 400,000 people it must be one heck of a factory.
Seen in the supermarket
A magazine that comes with pencils. Int he past I’ve only seen (and bought) ‘children magazines’ (Simpsons, Disney) that came with pencils.
Seen in a shop on FuZhou road in Shanghai
A ‘graphite object’.
From the description:
Please Use! Functional Graphite Object writes like a pencil while resists staining your hands. Handcrafted using a proprietary technique that San Francisco artist Agelio Batle invented. With daily use they should last 7-9 years.
Functional Graphite Object writes like a pencil while resists staining your hands. Handcrafted using a proprietary technique that San Francisco artist Agelio Batle invented.
Seen at the chemist [1]Not any old chemist, even a dispensing chemist.
A crazy golf set – with one pencil, one golf putter eraser, three golf ball erasers and more.
Seen at the airport
Cheap Rhodia notebooks [2]Well, cheap for UK standards.. Only €1.20 for a Bloc Rhodia N° 12.
Seen in the catalogue of a distributor of electrical and related products
After The Game: Another TV series about cold war spies. Sean told me about this one. It’s called Deutschland 83 and its current IMDB rating is 8.5.
As the name suggests it takes place in 1983. Here’s a Castell 9000 in B you can see in episode 4, used by Professor Tischbier (Alexander Beyer) from the East German Secret Service.
Here’s a comparison of the modern Castell 9000, as seen in Deutschland 83 – with the water-based varnish side facing the camera, and the actual Castell 9000 from 1983. The green got even darker, the thick line on the end of the pencils changed from gold to silver/grey and the text printed on the pencils has changed.
Castell 9000, now (top) and 1983 (bottom)
The screenshot in this blog post has been taken from Episode Four of Deutschland 83. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
Then something else happened: after more than ten years I got the first Noris from my employer! We usually get Lyreco pencils in the stationery cupboard at work, but last week and this week I did another task in another part of my employer’s organisation [1]In case you are familiar with the UK Higher Education sector: I was doing clearing. – and there was a box of Noris pencils in the stationery basket. Maybe the good stuff (the Noris pencils) is usually reserved for management and special occasions? We did get all the good stuff on the day: they did provide tea, coffee, biscuits, even Snickers etc [2]and there must have been a serious Snickers thief. Every day at least three shoe box sized baskets of Snickers, Mars and KitKat disappeared. I guess everyone would have had to eat at least five bars … Continue reading, so if they give us expensive food, why not expensive pencils, too? I wish we had Noris pencils all year round at work…
A School Noris
…and finally – more Back to School offers. This time in Sainsbury’s. Five Noris pencils for £1.12. Not as good as the Staples offer I mentioned recently, but at Sainsbury’s you don’t have to take five HBs, you can also take the ‘graded’ pack.
The screenshots in this blog post has been taken from Episode Three of Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, a documentary on the BBC. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
and there must have been a serious Snickers thief. Every day at least three shoe box sized baskets of Snickers, Mars and KitKat disappeared. I guess everyone would have had to eat at least five bars to make so much food disappear.
There were also at least two more Noris pencils and a Noris sharpener – with two million viewers on the BBC.
I’ll also use this opportunity to link to the Noris in the Wild page again.
The screenshots in this blog post has been taken from Episode Two of Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, a documentary on the BBC. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
The Danes have it good. They can already enjoy the second season of The Legacy / Arvingerne while here in the UK the first season only just finished.
Pencil spotting
There were of course pencils to be spotted in the first season. While previous pencils spotted in Danish TV series were either German or unidentified we hit the jackpot this time: a Danish pencil!
As mentioned in a previous blog post I’m quite lucky to have some Danish stationery, most from Henrik and some from Rad and Hungry. This meant that I was able to spot that the Viking pencil in question is the older, pre-2012 version of the Viking Skjoldungen 400. At that time the Skjoldungen was still offered in B, HB, H and 2H – labelled using the Thoreaus’ system, i.e. using numbers 1-4. Now the Skjoldungen 400 is only available in HB – and labelled as HB, not as #2 [1]Viking still has some old stock left though (February 2015) which can be bought on their website..
The pre-2012 and the current Skjoldungen 400
Pencil grades
The Skjoldungen 400 is a really nice pencil. My main issue is that the HB/#2 is a too soft for my taste, it is softer than most European HB pencils and doesn’t keep the point long enough to be convenient for writing lots of text – at least not if you are writing using rather small letters like I do (That’s why I love the Deli 0635 and mechanical pencils with 0.2 or 0.3/0.35 mm leads). The #3 pencil on the other hand is in my opinion already a bit on the hard side for everyday writing. It is however not really harder than other H pencils [2]So the HB is quite a bit softer than other European HB pencils, while the H is in the same league as other H pencils.. It would be great if Viking’s HB was a bit harder or if there was an F pencil …but since they even stopped making this pencil in B, H and 2H there’s not much chance of an F pencil being made, I guess.
Conclusion
Even though the HB pencil is too soft for me when it comes to everyday writing, it might be suitable for many or most other pencil users – many other pencils that are too soft for me, like some Japanese HB or Palomino pencils, seem to be used and preferred by lots of people, so don’t let me put you off if you have a chance to try this pencil for yourself.
I believe that the use of the the screen shot of the Viking pencil, taken from the seventh episode of the first season of Arvingerne falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
Seen at the chemist [1]Not any old chemist, even a dispensing chemist.
Seen in the catalogue of a distributor of electrical and related products
