Describe a gift you got.

So the gift I'd like to talk about is a fountain pen — a proper old-fashioned one, with a dark green marbled barrel and a gold nib that's worn slightly flat on one side from years of use. It came in a battered little box that had clearly been sitting in a drawer for decades.

My grandfather gave it to me on the morning I left for university. He didn't make any ceremony of it — he just pressed it into my hand at the door and said something like, "You'll write better things with it than I ever did." It turned out he'd used that same pen for thirty-odd years at work, so it wasn't remotely new, and that was precisely what made it mean something.

As for what I did with it, I used it for absolutely everything at first — lecture notes, letters home, even shopping lists, which in hindsight was a bit ridiculous. It leaked in my bag more than once and I had to learn how to clean and refill it properly. These days I save it for things that actually warrant it: birthday cards, and the journal I've kept ever since.

Honestly, I felt a bit overwhelmed when he handed it over. At eighteen you don't quite grasp what it means for someone to give you something they've used every day for half their life. He passed away three years later, so now it's easily the most valuable thing I own — not in money terms, obviously, but in every way that actually counts.