For all the love that fans pour have for the cars of 007, too many seem to get destroyed all too cavalierly on screen. Take the original gadget car, the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, which my dad loved dearly: deadly serious (with a wink) with its tire shredders, battering ram, machine gun lights and bulletproof shield. And even an ejector seat for uncooperative passengers! Only to get totalled by an optical illusion. Yikes!
And that is why while I admired the DB5 for its ingenuity, I loved the Esprit for making it back ashore in style
For this pairing, I leapt ahead a couple of decades to Pierce Brosnan’s debut in Goldeneye. Forget about the wimpy BMW Z3 that only made a cameo in the end… For me, the best gadget in the movie was the classic Parker Jotter ballpoint in stainless steel (i.e. ‘Flighter’), which was disguised as a grenade that could be armed by clicking it twice. It was a memorable scene where it played out explosively in the fidgeting hands of a rogue Russian programmer.
Was it strange that a British agent would be equipped with a quintessentially American writing instrument? Well, I would hazard a guess that Major Boothroyd or ‘Q’ probably sourced his supply of Jotters from the Newhaven factory, located in East Sussex, England. Established by Parker in 1921, the factory churned out high quality pens up till 2010 and was demolished in 2014. Many of my vintage Parker pens like Vector, Frontier and numerous Jotter were either made in Newhaven or Janesville. Today, I find the Made In France examples lacking somehow, especially when I can see the drop in finesse for the buttons (no longer bearing the ‘P’ initial) and the shallow detailing on the clips.
On average, I am not a big Parker fan, but I reckon their ballpoint pens can be both lightweight and functionally effective, so for a while my EDC pen was precisely a Jotter Flighter — although, one “Made in France”, and hence on the lower end. Parker FP’s are another story, but I haven’t fallen into that pit yet.
I also own a Jotter MP in 0.5 (again, of French origins), which is cool despite its non-removable clip, but my favourite specimens in the Parker sub-family are the following:
An unusual Parker Jotter Flighter with an MP insert for 0.9 thin cores: the body itself is probably made for a BP, but inside someone placed a “Parker Cartridge Pencil Refill — NDS Messy Lead Handling” insert with three metal prongs holding the lead core like a miniature clutch pencil. The pencil is marked “Made in England”, with a flat pushbutton sporting a depressed circle with the bow-and-arrow symbol stamped in the metal flange; the insert is Made in USA;
A Parker Centennial desk twistaction MP in 0.9, with its seamless arrow-like design, and without any clip, marked “Made in USA”, which came to me without its stand or the companion BP, and hence roams around my collection like a lonely traveller, but delivers quite nicely and clearly stands out in the context of 0.9 pencils.
I assume both these items are less common, but not impossible to get; the Centennial was found on Ebay some time ago, whereas the MP/BP was a find during a Pen Show somewhere in Italy. The finish on the metal is generally nice, and the balance is overall good for that kind of design, even though I prefer the tip-heavy models a bit more.
Ah! That 0.9mm cartridge… I have a couple of those and they are like an alternative to the Schmidt system. A bit hard to retract the exposed lead when you’re done… the clutch is very close fitting.
Yes, the only way out is to free the clutch by pressing the rear button, and use a hard surface like a desk top as a leverage element to manually retract the lead inside the pipe — works a bit like those old 1.18mm MP’s, and I consider this as part of the charm.
