Recently, I bought a book on Amazon, about English as a Global Language. I’ve not read it right through yet, but it seems really good.
As regulars here will know, one of the things I like to do is reproduce short excerpts from books. This I do by scanning. But, unfortunately, my copy of English as a Global Language came to me full of underlinings of what the previous owner consider to be significant sentences and phrases. For what it’s worth, I often agreed with his choices. But such underlinings play havoc with scanning, so I wanted them gone.
Luckily they were not in ink, only in pencil. So, an eraser of some kind ought to do the trick. So, where could I buy an eraser locally? I actually wasn’t sure. It would certainly be a palaver. So, maybe I already owned an eraser. I had a rootle through a couple of small transparent crates, which I use to keep such things as pens, pencils, felt tip markers, and so forth and so on.
I found several erasers, all hard as rock. They hadn’t been used for a decade and they might as well have been plastic cutlery for all the use they were for removing pencil marks. But then, I came across this:
Just like everything else in the crate, this thing had not been touched for a decade. This too would prove useless, surely.
But no. It worked perfectly. The rubber was as soft and useable as it was the day, lost in the mists of time of the previous decade or even longer, when I first acquired it. Amazing. And the print of the book was utterly untouched, so soft was the rubber of this wondrous item.
One of the things you seldom see on the internet is any reportage of how well something works a decade later. Usually the reviews are instant. Does it work now? If it does, five stars, or four if you have some minor quibble about it.
So now, I am delighted to report that the STAEDTLER Mars plastic, or whatever it’s called, has real staying power, as a remover of pencil marks. Buy a STAEDTLER Mars plastic now, and if you still have it a decade hence, it will still work.
The thing is, it was such a trivial task. To have to have spent an afternoon wandering around London SW1 looking for a new eraser would have been so annoying. To be able to get erasing right away was just so satisfying, compared to all that nonsense. That the actual erasing took hardly any time at all only emphasises the contrast between how well things went and how annoyingly they would have gone, in the absence of my STAEDTLER Mars plastic.
I may never do any actual scanning of this book, but that’s not the point. The point is, now I can, with no bother.
