IN 1981, aged 14, I was studying for my ceramics O-Level.

I was practicing making little human figures out of clay, with the result that I ended up with a lot of little human figures made out of clay.

Most of them were summarily reconsigned to the clay bin, but a few caught my fancy, and one survives, nearly 40 years later.

On my desk, where it has been for most of the intervening time, is the pencil sharpener I made in my ceramics class in 1981.

It’s no ordinary sharpener, as it takes the form of a male corpse gruesomely sprawled upon an anonymous rock. His pale, blank face is a mask of frozen agony, his hand scrapes its nails on the rock in the throes of death.

A gaping hole over his heart oozes entrails, in the way that only a teenage imagination can properly envision. Red paint indicates the blood welling up from his collapsed chest and dribbling from his mouth. Actually, the red paint has by now faded to orange — I must repaint it one of these decades.

The entertainingly functional part of the sharpener, of course, is the hole in the man’s chest.

To use it, one must stick the pencil in and rotate it. The sculpture is transformed to a man impaled by a giant pencil.

Readers, I was only a child when I made that, and it still makes me chuckle now. I regret nothing.

Recently I found the efficiency of the sharpener was fading, and I looked inside, where a traditional metal pencil sharpener is glued into position. On the side of this is a slot where spare blades are stowed, and I was amazed to find that of the three spare blades I had started with in 1981, one remained.

I installed the new, 40-year-old blade, and returned to sharpening pencils. But I was still troubled — if I was getting through blades at a rate of one every ten years, what would happen in 2030?

If you’d asked 1981 me how to deal with that problem I don’t think I’d have been bothered.

After all, I’d be just two years away from retirement in 2030, and by then, would pencils even exist?

What I would not have predicted was the significance of something else that happened to me in 1981.

At a schoolfriend’s house I encountered his family’s newest acquisition — a ZX81 computer.

I was awestruck by this tiny, warm, plasticky box which plugged into the family television and gave me a tantalising glimpse of what could happen in a world where computers were available in every home.

And a successor to that machine solved my problem here in 2020. With a bit of online research I identified a supplier of pencil sharpener blades that would fit a 40-year-old pencil sharpener, and paid 89p to have them posted through my letterbox in less than 24 hours.

The 14-year-old me could hardly have imagined such a world.