Sic Note

Paper! It has to rank as one of the greatest of man's inventions, along with the wheel, the football and the long-playing record. Already you can tell I'm in not entirely serious mood today. I'm down in London to celebrate the anniversary of my elder daughter's birth half a lifetime ago - meaning she is now the age that I was when she was born one glorious July day back in the 1980s. (I'll give you a minute to think about that one.)

I remember when she was about three, she would sit on the sofa holding the newspaper as wide as her little arms would allow - it was a broadsheet - pretending to read it just like her parents did (not that we pretended, you understand). Her ability to start reading for herself wasn't far behind and she grew up loving books and reading. She came home from Primary School one day a little indignant and upset because she and her teacher had disagreed in class about the spelling of caterpillar - the teacher had misspelled it but had insisted that she was right and my daughter (who spelled it correctly) was wrong. I think a discreet apology was offered next day.

Talking of schools, I must regale you with a few choice tales from the chalkface. I taught English and Drama in a north London comprehensive school for a number of years and as a form teacher I was accustomed to receiving notes from parents about their offspring, explaining their absence from school or requesting their exemption from certain activities. These notes arrived in a variety of guises: some were typed, some were written in florid script, some were scrawled, some came on headed notepaper, some were scented, some were laboriously spelled out in capital letters, many were in sealed envelopes, others were hastily scribbled on whatever was to hand - the back of an old envelope, a square cut out of a cereal packet, a page torn from an exercise book. Some were written by the children themselves (excusable if their parents were illiterate or non-English speaking). Occasionally the notes were very funny. I have a soft spot in my memory banks for these three:

Dear Mr Rowland, Tiffany is not to have a shower after games this week as she is suffering from mildew.

Dear Sir, would you be so kind to allow Oswald to be excused the exam today. He fell downstairs last night and has a slight brain damage.

Your honour. Humblest apologies for my daughter Samina's absence from school last week. She attended her sister's wedding and missed her plane home. 

Paper - How It Was Made/The Tools Of The Trade

Moving on. Nowadays, those of us who use paper to write or print on are accustomed to A4 pads or reams (A4 being 210 x 297cm or 8.21 x 11.7in for the Imperialists among you). A4 is the most commonly used size in the civilised world - the exception being the New World (USA, Canada and central America) where they use Letter and Legal sizes.

It wasn't always so in the Old World actually. The convergence on A4 standard came in the 19th century. Before that foolscap was widely used (along with folio and quarto); foolscap being slightly wider and considerably longer than A4 (at 200 x 330cm or 8.5 x 13.5in). What you really want to know is: Why was it called foolscap?

The answer appears to be: Because of the watermark (commonly a depiction of a jester's cap with bells) built into the paper and barely visible when dry to prove that it was genuine top quality paper stock and not some cheap substitute. I thought it was a pre-urban myth, but apparently not. The foolscap watermark is recorded as early as the 15th century and was made by pressing a mould onto not-yet-dry paper so as to almost imperceptibly vary the thickness and thus allow more light through.

And so to my own sic note (complete with BoJoker watermarking) -

Nota Bene
To whom it should be concerning,
this recycled paper is full of old news.

You'd think we'd pulped the truth
in mulching up those inky pages,
but as I diarise atrocities anew
by post-apocalyptic candlelight
faint headlines reveal themselves
like watermarks within the sheet.

I read of blind ambition,
over-weening pride, lies and deception,
a people shepherded to a precipice.

All this print was created
in an analogue age, predating micro this
and digital that, way before the waging
of cyber-wars, the death of the web
and the runaway greenhouse effect;
and yet its portentous message
is as relevant now as it ever was,
for the patterns of the human heart
are timeless till the last one
beats its last.

I append to this account
(for the day may not be far away)
my final will and testament:

To my son, my shoes - fill them well.
To my daughter, my blues - sing them loud.
Hold each other fast
for however long is left.
Remember how lovely trees were
before they were all felled.
Dream of cool breezes.

Please excuse the brevity and thanks for reading, S ;-)