Schooldays – the best of your life?
Sure, for some people they were filled with the excitement of conversing with fellow students, eagerly waiting to hear who would be made the next playground monitor or receiving gold star after gold star for exemplary academic achievements.
For others, though, schooldays were a rollercoaster of emotions spent trying to fit in with other, more confident children or the latest cool trend. From Kickers shoes (too high) to yo-yos (you'll have someone's eye out), parental figures were there, clipping your wings at every step of the way. God, MUM.
One of the best ways to show off how incredibly hip you were was through the medium of stationery. From Purple Ronnie ring binders to fluffy pencil cases, your yearly trip to WHSmith became less about buying what you needed to do reading and writing, and more about conveying who you, at 8 years old, really were in the pegging order of school politics.
Read on to remember the wins, the losses, the highs and the lows of your school stationery purchases (thanks Mum, really).
The Fizzy Pop Can Pencil Case
You might not have been allowed fizzy drinks at school after Simon from Year Three drank six Fanta Lemons and started foaming at the mouth but no one could stop you toting around your pens and pencils in your Coca Cola can pencil case. Live the brand. Be the brand.
Groovy Chick Everything
Hell, the whole Bang On The Door crew are welcome on a night out any time they fancy it. Believe it or not, you can still purchase Groovy Chick branded products from their spectacularly nostalgic website.
Magic Erasable Pens
Straight up, these Did. Not. Work. The idea was there – write your stuff with the blue end, erase it all with the white end but, really, you just ended up with a smudgy mess of soggy paper. A* for innovation, WHSmith; D- for implementation.
Troll Pencil Toppers
No one’s ever really got to the bottom of the Troll phenomenon. Naked little gremlins with a shock of synthetic hair? What was the appeal? Nevertheless, these creepy little mooches somehow made it into our homes, our pencil cases and eventually, our hearts.
Gel Pens
Glitter, pastel, beautiful. The cool girls at school got them first; you had to wait a term until your mum finally realised that kids weren’t sniffing the scented ones to "get high".
The Pencil Grip
Sure, protect our delicate fingers from the harsh realities of writing 300 words but where were those same sympathies when it came to catching a netball in zero-degree weather in PE?
Fountain Pens
“This is what grown-up people use to write in joined-up writing” our teachers intoned to a class full of despairing children covered in blue and black ink stains. Now, years later, joke’s on them. I use a computer to write.
The Triple Threat Highlighter
One shiny white triangle, three separate highlighter colours to choose from. Definitely made marking up poignant sentences in Carol Ann Duffy’s finest works more satisfying.
The Tipp-Ex Mouse
Made making mistakes fun. Until you started making them for the pure pleasure of using said Tipp-Ex Mouse and turned your no-doubt-otherwise-splendid essay on the themes and context of Of Mice And Men into a mess of white stripes.
Bendy Rulers
Weapon of science and maths, or weapon with which to assault your classmates? You choose.
Berol Pens
Who was Berol? Why did she have the marker pen market sewn up? Answers on a postcard please.
Rainbow Pen
One pen, 10 different choices of ink. An early example of how society contributed to millennials’ inability to make meaningful decisions and stick to them.
The Giant Rubber
“For really big mistakes” read the packaging in the patronising sort of way that made you realise that the stationery industry had little-to-no faith in the academic output of future generations.
The Fluffy Pen
Cher from Clueless popularised them, you followed suit. 10/10 did not mix well with your family cat.
Gul Pencil Case
Handily made out of wetsuit material in case your pencils ever decided to go surfing in the baltic British sea.
The Giant Pencil
Wildly ineffective for actually writing anything of note, these pencils often came with a packet of similarly ineffective teeny tiny colouring pencils attached to the top. Useless all round.
Folding Ruler
Fantastically useful that one time – and one time only – you used a bit of paper bigger than A4.
The Push-Up Rainbow Crayon
All fun and games until you lost a bit. Then you were reduced to using the minuscule nibs all by themselves. Disaster.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
Here Are The Cheapest Postcodes For Renting A Room In London