Turn over the back page of any notepad that has lived beside a till or a telephone and there is usually a small crowd of spirals in one corner. They are the first words of pens. Before a pen is trusted with anything, it is asked to draw a loop that means nothing, and you can often see the exact moment it was hired: the line starts as a dry scratch and darkens halfway round. Nobody reads these and nobody minds them. It may be the only writing anywhere whose whole message is “I can”, and it is always true by the time it is finished.