Fetishism*

[desperance]

When I arrived at the Lit & Phil this morning, there was a big lorry outside unloading boxes of stationery. I felt my usual shivery thrill at these circumstances, and walked up the stairs into the library thinking that all the writers I know are similarly kinky, that we all grew up with a fetish for office supplies. Pens and pencils, reams and quires of paper (in foolscap and quarto for preference; I have learned to love A4, but I will never come to fancy American letter size, that's just disproportionate and wrong). Carbon-paper and cartridge paper. Bottles of ink and blotting-paper. Tracing-paper and erasers. For me there were also compasses and set-squares and dividers and graph-paper and slide-rules, but you might need to be a maths geek too to desire those.

But then as I reached the head of the stairs and came through the double doors, it struck me that all these things are no longer the appurtenances of the writer, and I dunno. Are we the last generation to be kinky for the contents of the stationery cupboard? Do kids these days not get that, because these are not the tools they use?


*When I was a teen, a friend played me a single from which the only lines I remember are:

"What's fetishism?"
"Plump thighs!" cried the plump-thighed pigeons.

Tragically, Google does not know this work. [This page may be a Googlewhack; I g'd "plump-thighed pigeons" and it found nothing. Until, presumably, now.] I may have asked before, and someone may have told me, for you are all brilliant and I am forgetful; but can anyone place it?

Comments

[badbookworm]

I'm 30, and most definitely have a stationery fetish, if that helps?