For my fiftieth birthday, I requested some of the legendary Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, I had seen a CNN documentary about it and got a bit obsessed. The Chalk of Champions. Also who knew mathematicians are so obsessed with chalk?

It seemed a reasonable request as on 10th October 2020 things were looking pretty scary, and in fact the second lockdown began on 5th November. So I wanted to keep my requests simple, and chalk is as simple as it gets.

I had an old pot of blackboard paint and a plywood sheet, and found the unexpected benefit of having a blackboard behind me on zoom calls, meant people could sort of see how I was thinking, and it blocked out my messy work room. It was also a bit more old school than buying a white board.

The chalk is lovely, really smooth, but ultimately it’s just chalk. But writing stuff out on blackboards is very satisfying. The story of how it has survived as a business is also very touching. But I think I got my lifetimes supply in one go.

In 2015 Hagoromo’s last president, Takayasu Watanabe, who had bespoke machine for making his chalks, closed the business, as schools abandoned blackboards and demand plummeted. But rather wonderfully Shin Hyeong-seok a Korean cram school teacher, persuaded Watanabe to let him keep the chalk business going in Korea. So the machines moved to Korea, and we can now all buy them on Amazon. As Shin says at the end of this article, “Chalkboards are more visible than whiteboards because the latter reflects light so strongly,” he said. “Also, marker pens contain more harmful substances than chalk. Though the chalk industry’s downfall is undeniable, I do believe in the strength of chalk.”