Deskatology

Have desk, will travel.

I have noted in previous posts how much I hate travelling. Some in my profession like nothing better than jetting around the world to an endless series of academic conferences, but I keep that particular side of the job to a bare minimum. (My decision about whether or not to accept an invitation to speak somewhere depends very much upon the number of pen shops in the city in question. I have recently turned down three offers because there appeared to be no stockists of ink in the area.) In fact, my passport expired in January, and I have yet to renew it. Perhaps I never will, for I have been quietly enjoying life without the ability to engage in tourism (or what Don DeLillo has accurately called 'the march of stupidity').

And it's good to know that I'm not alone. Honorary Penquod crew member Arty recently reminded me about Joris-Karl Huysmans' À Rebours (usually known in English as Against Nature). I read the book as an undergraduate nearly twenty years ago, but I'd somehow forgotten all about it until Arty commented upon the relentless misanthropy of its protagonist, Des Esseintes. I revisited the tale a couple of days ago, then, and I was stunned to find that À Rebours, which I read and paid little attention to as an optimistic youth, is essentially (Esseintes-ially?) the biography of the thirty-something moi. Here's what I mean: the feeble, neurotic, degenerate Des Esseintes decides that he has had enough of human society (or, as he puts it, 'the incessant deluge of human stupidity'), and his 'contempt for humanity' leads him to abandon Paris for the isolation of a villa above Fontenay-aux-Roses. Once installed in his retreat, he devotes himself to what can only be called a series of decadent aesthetic potterings. One chapter, for instance, describes how he sits at his dressing-room table and experiments with different perfumes, while we're told at another point that his residence contains 'a glass-fronted bookcase in which a collection of silk socks was displayed in the form of a fan'. He likes ink, too, for his garden features an 'ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink', and one of his luxurious books has been 'printed for him in bishop's-purple ink'. As I reread Huysmans' words, I felt as if I were looking in a mirror (handcrafted in the East and carried by servants in a mink-lined case across the world to Ink Towers, of course).

But it was the hilarious chapter on tourism that really appealed to me. Not long after he has nearly killed himself with his perfumes, Des Esseintes decides that he will come out of isolation and travel to London. His servants pack his bags, and he sets off in 'a mottled check [suit] in mouse grey and lava grey, a pair of laced ankle-boots, a little bowler hat and a faux-blue Inverness cape'. (No pocket square, monsieur? You disappoint me.) By the time he gets to Paris, it is pouring: 'The appalling weather struck him as an instalment of English life paid to him on account in Paris'. He decides to have something to eat before continuing with his voyage, but he then finds that his stomach is too full to allow him to move. He tries to rouse himself with a brandy, but his desire to travel begins to wane. 'After all', we're told, 'what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair?' He still has time to catch his train, however, and he makes one last effort to drive himself onwards. He fails. '"If I went now", he said to himself, "I should have to dash up to the barriers and hustle the porters along with my luggage. What a tiresome business it would be!"' Defeated, he returns to his retreat, 'feeling all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous journey'.

But perhaps my hatred of travel is on the verge of disappearing. Perhaps I am about to become a vibrant, enthusiastic, sociable globe-trotter. I say this because I noticed something rather intriguing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement. In the corner of one of the classified pages, I spotted an advertisement for something called 'The Travelling-Desk'. (Don't ask me why it's hyphenated. Is the idea that the object allows its owner to keep everything under one -- hupo hen -- lid?) This delightful creation is a little difficult to deskribe, so I will simply direct readers to the company's website, where many photographs may be deskried. Go and have a look; I'll wait here at my desk...

Rather attractive, don't you think? I am drawn to the Travelling-Desk for a couple of reasons. First, it reminds me of the desks with which the classrooms of my junior school were equipped. Even though it was the late 1970s/early 1980s, and even though we were taught to write with ballpoint pens, we sat at old-fashioned desks with sloped lids and inkwells. (Well, I say 'inkwells', but the reality was that most of the plastic containers had been stolen, leaving gaping holes in the corners of the desks. Those lucky enough to have an original inkwell still in place often found that the object in question was caught up in a game of 'How High Can You Go?', in which the lid was lifted and a hand placed in the small gap beneath the base of the inkwell. The trick was then to slam your palm upwards to see how high the inkwell would fly.) A day did not pass without someone finding his or her fingers slammed beneath a lid. On one infamous occasion, the teacher spotted smoke emerging from the hole in the corner of one boy's desk. (His name was Royston, I think.) We were about to flee for our lives when it was discovered that he had secreted a plastic 'smoking monkey' among his books.

Beyond this nostalgia, though, I am drawn to the Travelling-Desk because it would, I feel, allow me to counter the trauma of travel with a properly equipped set of writing materials. I can imagine the scene:

'Would passengers please note that mobile telephones and other electronic devices are not to be used during the flight, as they may interfere with the plane's navigation system. Sir?'
'How about inkwells and dip pens?'
'Excuse me?'
'How about inkwells and dip pens? Am I allowed to get my Travelling-Desk out of the overhead locker, uncork the ink, and catch up on some correspondence?'
'Were you the passenger who was detained for an hour by security after an argument over whether or not a quill could be used to hijack a plane?'
'Yes. You could say that feathers were ruffled.' [Riotous laughter from other passengers.]
'And do I take it from your stained mouth that you were required to drink some of your ink at the checkpoint to prove that it wasn't an explosive substance?'
'No, that wasn't me. I just got a bit thirsty while we were waiting to leave the terminal.'
'Won't your Travelling-Desk get in the way when we serve you your in-flight meal?'
'Not at all. It's sushi today, isn't it?'
'Indeed.'
'Excellent. I have a spare inkwell with me for the soy. And these two dip pens convert into chopsticks.'
'But what about the sloped lid? Won't your food slide off it?'
'Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. Do you think you could ask the captain to dip the nose of the plane by about 45 degrees during lunch? That ought to level things out.'

The word 'desk' apparently has its roots in 'discus', the Latin word for 'disc'. I don't know the reason for this, though. Did the Romans only write at round desks? Is a desk with corners a modern phenomenon? Or did the modern sport of discus-throwing emerge from an ancient ritual in which centurions proved their strength by hurling desks across a field? I will have to look into matters, dear readers. Ink fact, I hereby announce the creation of the new academic discipline (deskipline?) of deskatology. It will be the discipline to end all disciplines, no doubt.

It seems, then, that my desklike of travelling might have reached the end of the road. The Travelling-Desk has the potential to close the lid on a difficult chapter of my life. Je serai libéré d'esklavage. Future generations of students studying deskatology will find the following question upon their examination papers:

Disgust is disguised by a discus. Discuss.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray; Waterman Florida Blue.

PS: I still haven't been able to find time to get to the university library to run the nineteenth-century history of ink mentioned in my last couple of posts through the microfilm machine. I am now aiming to do this on Friday.

PPS (2.30pm): More information about the Travelling-Desk has just landed upon my, er, desk. Thanks to the Paris-based honorary Penquod member without a pseudonym -- as I have said in previous posts, elle n'est pas Trisha -- I can report that the object of desire is also available from Pen and Co. I applaud a particular line in the company's publicity: 'A l'heure du Blackberry et de l'iPhone ... voici un retour dans le temps agréable'. (I suppose that a rough translation of that could be: 'In the era of the Blackberry and the iPhone ... here is a pleasant trip down memory lane').

Hunting Done

Quest over. Hunting done.

I'm not referring to the search for the perfect ink, dear readers; that, no doubt, will continue until I breathe my last and go to the great inkwell in the sky. I am, rather, speaking of my search for a new career. Yes, dear readers, I have finally discovered my calling.

While doing some research on ink a few weeks ago, I came across a reference to a short piece by Charles A. Owen, Jr., published in the Chaucer Newsletter in 1980. It was the title that caught my eye: 'A Note on the Ink in Some Chaucer Manuscripts'. Inktrigued, I requested a copy of the article, and it arrived in an envelope from the University of Liverpool a couple of days ago.

Owen's account is no longer than half a page, but it describes in fascinating detail his scrutiny of the ink used in various manuscripts of Chaucer's work. Here's his magnificent inkipit:

One of the surprises I experienced working on the Ellesmere manuscript at the Huntington Library this past January was the color of the ink. The description in Manly-Rickert, "Uniform dark brown" (I, 148), hardly does justice to the actuality.

The author proceeds to describe how Chaucer manuscripts are characterised by 'constant variation in the color of the ink', how this variation might have been a deliberate strategy on the part of the scribes, and then concludes by calling for 'a more accurate descriptive set of terms' to which scholars could turn when discussing fluctuations in the colour of ink used in manuscripts.

Ink Towers is a long way from the Huntington Library (which lies in San Marino, California). And, although some of my colleagues have devoted decades of their lives to Chaucer, I have not read a single word of his work. (I went to the house of sceptical colleague Carlos for lunch yesterday, in fact, and another colleague who was there pointed at an elegant edition of Chaucer's work on the bookshelf while Carlos was in the kitchen and said, 'I bet that's not in your bookcase'.) But it's clear to me that I need to reinvent myself as a Chaucerian and take up residence in the Huntington, where I will, nearly thirty years after Charles A. Owen called for the development of a special inky vocabulary, be in charge of creating the new lexinkon.

The only problem is that I simply don't know where to begin. As I have noted in previous posts, I don't actually know anything about anything, and my entire career in academia has been an act of deception. But I'm particularly helpless when it comes to fourteenth-century English literature. Yes, there are modern translations of Chaucer's work, but contemporary English won't be of much help if I'm going to be working with texts such as the fifteenth-century Ellesmere manuscript.

But perhaps there's a solution. Perhaps my role at the Huntington would simply be to describe in detail the ink used in the texts. Perhaps, that is to say, I would need to pay no attention whatever to the meaning of the words upon the page; I'd simply be developing a lexinkon to describe how they look. This would be literature not as the expression of the human spirit, of eternal truths, but literature as a series of pretty colours upon the page.

All surface and no depth, in other words. A complete lack of content. Shallow aestheticism. Mindless superficiality. I was born for this job. ('I can do this [...] I've been preparing for this moment my entire life.') Ink Quest: putting the cant back in the Canterbury Tales.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray.

PS: I have not yet had chance to consult the nineteenth-century history of ink to which I referred in my previous post. I will take it with me to the Huntington and, I hope, report back in detail next week.

PPS (3.50pm): I can't let the day pass without praising the author of Ravens March for his bold decision to purchase a pocket protector for his fountain pens (and for his pockets, moreover). 'I have joined the ranks of the most risible sort of geek', he writes. I can't think of a better place to be.

PPPS (3.55pm): I also feel compelled to direct readers of Ink Quest to a delightful tribute to Michael Jackson penned by ink-loving West Highland Terrier Grover J. Askins on his blog, Hudographies. I can't claim to have been a fan of Michael Jackson, but Grover's words are a joy to read.

1776 and All That

Ink Quest will return with a full-length missive at some point next week, dear readers, partly because I will by then have had time to read the history of ink written in the 1880s and sent to me on microfilm by the British Library. (What secrets wait within? Will the narrative be as thrilling as that of David N. Carvalho's Forty Centuries of Ink? Will I embarrass myself yet again in the university library when I try to use the microfilm reader?)

I have put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard this evening, though, because it occurred to me at about 6pm that today, 4 July, is a rather significant date for Ink Quest's many American readers. I have always been a lover of the United States, partly because I spent a year of my life in Northern California, and partly because I am constantly campaigning for independence from the United Kingdom. (I still want to live here; I just don't want to be a citizen or, worse still, a subject.)

With angle of palm duly adjusted, I salute you all, then, dear American readers, whether you are (like, say, honorary Penquod crew members Stefan, Gerry, and Anna) currently in your homeland or (like Susie and Noelle, for example) exiled on this side of the Atlantic. And I urge all of Ink Quest's readers to purchase a new bottle of ink today. (I'm about to order some Pelikan Blue, hoping that it will look similar to the ink used by Roland Barthes on his index cards.) Together we can turn Independence Day into Ink-Dependence Day:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dismiss the disposable ballpoints which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We inkthusiasts hold these truths to be self-evident, that all users of fountain pens are created equal, that they are endowed by the Mighty Ink with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of the Perfect Colour.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to celebrate Independence Day and the first ever Inkdependence Day with a thoroughly American bowl of Linguine al limone. (Actually, the recipe does have an American influence, for I have stolen a little trick from Silvano Marchetto, who runs New York's Da Silvano: dropping the lemon halves into the water with the pasta while it cooks.) Maybe I'll add a drop or two of Omas Sepia and turn into Linkuine al limone ... or should I use penne?

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.

What's the Use?

This blog is useless.

I say this partly because I have apparently managed to reduce its number of readers by around 30 per cent in the last week or so. (Only another 70 per cent to go! Encore un effort!) What seems like a fall in readership may simply be Sitemeter's inability to detect those who read Ink Quest via one of the new feeds that I recently added to the very bottom of the page. Alternatively, the slump might have occurred because I have, in my endless drive towards invisibility, deleted my Blogger profile, which used to list various fascinating facts about me. I understand from my puzzled reading of anthropological textbooks that many human beings like to know things about each other in order that they may develop connections and form social groups, so perhaps my removing the personal details has alienated certain readers. (As a colleague recently said to me, shortly after I had burned several professional bridges in the course of an ordinary afternoon at the office, 'There won't be anyone left for you to alienate before long'.) Or perhaps people have simply started to lose inkterest in the voyages of the Penquod. They're a touch repetitive, after all. (Man is still looking for the perfect ink. Man complains about something. Man claims that the universe is persecuting him. Man toys with some inane puns.)

But I also note the uselessness of Ink Quest for another reason. Ink fact, I want defiantly to celebrate its useless existence.

One particular incident has led me to this point. Yesterday morning, in the blazing sunshine, I stood with Baby Ink on the beach near Ink Towers and spent about half an hour throwing stones into the water. He may be small, but he's an unstoppable machine when it comes to the casting of pebbles into the waves. After about twenty minutes, it occurred to me that what we were doing was, while amusing, utterly devoid of purpose. Our throwing of stones had no aim (a bit like my throwing of stones, come to think of it), no planned outcome, no use. We were throwing stones ... for the sake of throwing stones. ('It ain't why ... it just is', as Van Morrison once sang.)

Contemporary English uses 'useless' in an almost exclusively negative sense. If something is 'useless', it's a failure to be ignored and rejected. And we live in a world, of course, that's dominated by principles of efficiency and measurability. In British higher education, for instance, it's perfectly common to find that every course (or 'module', as they're usually now called) has a set of 'learning outcomes'. For every module that I teach, in other words, I have to give an account of the outcome before the course has even begun. Students, if I may lapse into the future anterior, must know what will have happened and what they will have learned before the meeting of the first class. I am simply not allowed to say 'Well, we will read some books, think, talk, write, and see where we end up'. There is no space for such cavalier experimentation, for not knowing the outcome in advance would risk inefficiency. Everything must be predicted, predictable, measurable, measured. I have to know in advance what use my teaching will be, what it will add to students' 'transferable skills'; I can't risk being useless by aiming to read for the sake of reading, for the sake of seeing where, if anywhere, the words take us.

When I started teaching in higher education a decade ago, I tried to preserve traces of experimentation, of unpredictability, in my courses. I would, for instance, regularly devise learning outcomes to which I then paid no attention. No one seemed to notice, and the students produced some wonderfully original work. But now, ten years on, I have given up on ever seeing British higher education rise above the level of bland mediocracy. The culture of efficiency and measurability is at work on every possible level, and it's become impossible to see a light on the horizon. The idiots have won. What once seemed like a vocation has become a job to me -- I go in at 9am, do the act, whinge, gossip, and go home at 5pm -- and I'm just counting down the days to retirement in 2030-something. I teach my courses and I write my books like I stacked apples as a sixteen-year-old weekend employee of Safeway: efficiently, consistently, and with my mind somewhere else.

In all of this, ink -- and, by extension, Ink Quest -- stands out as something majestically useless. The endless hours I spend -- no, waste -- choosing a colour with which to write, looking at samples online, or wandering around cities in search of the perfect shade are a defiant antidote to the daily demands of efficiency and predictability. Yes, ink has a use -- it allows us to write -- but when it's taken to the level found here or at a forum such as the Fountain Pen Network, it enters the realm of the wholly unnecessary, the staggeringly useless. An inkthusiast doesn't need that forty-fifth blue or every single colour made by a particular manufacturer; the bottles become increasingly useless as they amass, ink fact, and it's not common for a lover of ink to use a colour just once before moving on to something new, thus rendering the bottle quite literally useless.

But I don't see this as anything to worry about. Ink fact, I think that it's time to reclaim the word 'useless' from those who wield it only as an insult. (I caused a minor controversy when I argued some months ago that lovers of fountain pens should embrace all charges of pretentiousness; I dread to think, then, what readers will make of my suggestion that they celebrate the uselessness of their ink.) In a world where bland efficiency rules and where maximizing the input-output ratio is the name of the game, ink stands -- nay, casually leans -- as a magnificent sign of resistance. Our messing around with colours, our idle mixing of shades in the hope that the perfect tint will emerge, our sending of letters that say nothing but 'This is Omas Sepia. One of the nicest browns around, I think', our pausing at the end of a page to let the ink dry for a precious few seconds -- all of these things are a stubborn blot on the landscape over which efficiency and measurability loom. When we write or perhaps simply doodle, our pens are spokes in the wheels of mediocracy. That minute spent refilling a pen while a tedious form from the university bureaucrats awaits completion is a minute reclaimed from banality. A minor victory in a war that we've always already lost.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, whose La Condition postmoderne foresaw in 1979 what principles of efficiency would do to higher education, once remarked that 'In a world where success means gaining time, thinking has a single, but irredeemable, fault: it is a waste of time'. (He's describing, not endorsing, that opinion, of course, and much of his work passionately defends experimentation and uselessness in the face of a creeping banality.) I could waste hours of your time celebrating the marvels of Lyotard's work, but you have ink to play with, dear readers. I will, then, simply say this: in a world where success means gaining time, inking has a single, but irredeemable fault: it is a waste of time. And that's why it matters. Ink for all you are worth. Waste your time and others'.

Don't use less; use more, useless.

Inks in useless use today: Noodler's Walnut; Waterman Florida Blue.

Cuff Inks

An off-the-cuff post on the cuff.

I left you in a state of suspense earlier this week, dear readers, as I reported that I was about to leave for my annual external examining trip to an unidentified university in the north of England. More specifinkally, I reported that I was trying to choose the ink that I would take with me for the signing of the forms that announce students' degree results.

I have now returned to Ink Towers, and I can reveal that I ended up selecting Noodler's Walnut. For the reasons outlined in my previous missive, I gave serious thought to Omas Sepia -- the Great Brown Whale -- but I eventually settled upon Walnut because it seemed wrong to break the Noodler's run. (Students graduating in 2007 saw their results endorsed by me in Noodler's Eternal Brown, while last year's group were treated to Noodler's Sequoia. 'Mum, dad, I got the result I wanted ... but forget about that. You should have seen the ink that the external examiner used to sign the sheets!')

Yesterday morning, then, after an evening in which my host department drank so much wine with dinner that one member of staff fell down -- or possibly up; no reliable witness could be found -- some stairs and was last seen on his way to hospital (my teetotalism seems to baffle and amuse them), we assembled for the annual ritual of determining degree classifications and, more importantly, signing the paperwork. At the end of the meeting, the departmental secretary presented me with the various pieces of paper needing my signature. I uncapped my Sailor Sapporo and unleashed the lovely dark brown ink. 'Ah', she said, 'now I remember. You use those funny inks'. She looked down at my scrawl. 'It doesn't seem to be drying', she noted.

She was right. The university in question is clearly equipped with the paper least receptive to Noodler's Walnut. It didn't look particularly shiny, but something about it was refusing to allow the ink to dry properly. 'Have you got any blotting paper with you?', asked the secretary. 'I'm afraid not', I replied, making a mental note to spend some of my examining fee on an Herbin rocker blotter for use at next year's meeting.

At this point, one of the professors in the department, who's a good friend of mine, came over to see what was happening and how I had managed to bring the entire end-of-year examining process to a halt. 'Oh, of course', he sighed. 'You and your bloody ink fetish.' 'You knew all about it when you appointed me', I replied. 'I have always been open and honest about my perverse practices. Besides, what kind of shambolic department are you running here? Where's your supply of blotting paper?'

'I think that we stopped using it in about 1964', he said. 'But I have an idea', he then added, looking sceptically at my French cuffs. (He had told me when I arrived that I was overdressed for the occasion.) 'Why don't you just use your flashy cuffs to soak up the excess ink?'

In the end, the secretary managed to dry the ink by waving the sheets in the air for a minute or two. My cuffs, that is to say, escaped unscathed. But my friend's remark started me thinking, and I spent the four-hour train journey home yesterday afternoon plotting -- nay, blotting -- the launch of a range of shirts for users of real ink, for inkthusiasts. These garments will still have double cuffs, which are one of life's absolute essentials, but, while most of each shirt will be made of luxurious cotton, the cuffs themselves will be formed from multiple layers of blotting paper. When the wearer has, say, signed his or her name (yes, dear readers, my clothing range will be available for both sexes), a cuff may be gently pressed against the ink. The marked layer of blotting paper can then be peeled away and discarded, leaving the inkthusiast with an immaculate cuff.

I must leave you now, dear readers, for I need to roll up my sleeves and get to work on the finer points of my design for the cuff blotter. There are, after all, complicated matters of chemise-try to consider. I only hope that my great scheme does not end in disaster and blot my cuffybook. I must be sure not to lose my inkvestors' money; I don't need even more people getting shirty with me.

Ink awaiting cuff today: Noodler's Walnut.

Ponderink

I lift a mode of title from Raven's March; I hope its crew will take it as an homage rather than a liberty.

Today's post will be brief, dear readers, and it is mainly intended to signal that Ink Quest will fall silent until at least the end of the week, as the Penquod is about to make its annual journey to an unnamed university in the north of England for external examining duties.

As the final part of this ritual involves my signing certificates that confirm students' final degree results, I always spend the days before my departure wondering about -- ponderink -- the colour of ink with which I will make my official mark. Two years ago it was Noodler's Eternal Brown; last year it was Noodler's Sequoia. What will it be this time around?

It would be a shame to break the Noodler's run and to ruin an inky trinity, but I'm currently considering Omas Sepia. I haven't written with this particular colour for a while, but longtime readers of this blog will know that it was the Great Brown Whale after which I chased for many months in the early days of Ink Quest. I still think it's one of the most elegant browns available, but I seem to have drifted away from it in recent times. Perhaps it's time for a renaissance.

I say that partly because I found my faith in another love restored last night. I have noted in many previous posts how Van Morrison is, along with Bob Dylan, one of my musical heroes. If I had to take just one album with me to a desert island, it would be Veedon Fleece. I've seen Morrison play live on probably something like 25 occasions, but I stopped going to his concerts in 2003. The recent albums were uninteresting, and the live performances had lost their magic. I decided to call it a day, rely upon the memories, and take refuge in the earlier recorded work.

After a break of six years, however, I went to see him play in Cardiff's Millennium Centre last night. Old friend Nixon, with whom I've seen Morrison on several glorious occasions, came over from London for the event, and, after some waterfront snacking, we took our seats and hoped for the best. I was expecting to be disappointed, but I soon found my breath taken away. The magic was back. Songs rarely performed live were unfurled. I think I'm right in saying that 'Fair Play' was played for only the second time since it was first recorded for Veedon Fleece. And I had barely recovered from the shock of hearing that song when we were treated to a sublime verson of 'In the Garden', during which Van faded the band out until all we could really hear was his acoustic guitar. He then whispered 'And your holy guardian angel' for what seemed like several minutes. That alone would have been enough to keep me happy for a lifetime, but then 'Streets of Arklow', also from Veedon Fleece, began. I've been waiting to hear this performed live for about eighteen years. Nixon, who knew this, glanced over and smiled. I nodded in shivered awe.

Before this becomes an issue of Rolling Stone, let's get back to ink, to ponderink. It seems only appropriate that, having refound my faith in Van Morrison, I should allow the Great Brown Whale back into my life and my pen. No guru, no method, no teacher; just Omas Sepia and a sense of wonder. Ink the garden.

Ink in use today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Reflections

What do you see in ink?

I mean that literally, dear readers. What do you see when you gaze into a bottle or a pool of ink?

In 'The Mirror of Ink', one of the tales in Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, it is told that Yakub the Afflicted, a tyrannical governor of the Sudan in the mid-nineteenth century, was shown miraculous visions by a sorcerer named Abderramen al-Masmudi. More specifically, those visions appeared in a pool of ink poured into Yakub's right palm, which had first been adorned with 'a magic square'. Initially, what Yakub sees is fairly untroubling: horses run through green fields, for instance. But soon a mysterious figure known as the Masked One begins to haunt the visions. Because his face is hidden behind a veil, his precise identity remains unknown.

On the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmajat, however, something rather dramatic happens. As usual, Abderramen pours the ink into Yakub's palm. Yakub asks the sorcerer to show him 'a just and irrevocable punishment'. In the ink, a condemned man is brought forward for execution. It is the Masked One. The tyrant demands that the veil be removed, and 'the horrified eyes of Yakub at last saw the visage -- which was his own face'. He watches as, in the scene played out in the pool of ink, the sword falls upon his own neck. At this very moment, reports the narrator, the real Yakub 'moaned and cried out in a voice that inspired no pity in me, and fell to the floor, dead'.

Borges' brief narrative is attributed to Richard Burton's The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa, but you will not find it there. Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, which dates from 1837, has something that loosely resembles the tale, but it's far from a perfect fit. I'd always assumed, then, that Borges was, as he so often does, inkventing bibliographical sources and passing off fantastic fiction for fact. But a chance discovery has led me to believe that ink-gazing is more than imaginary.

For reasons that are now lost in mystery, I stumbled this week across an article published in 1916 in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Its author is William H. Worrell -- the two syllables of the surname and the golden 'or' after the initial consonant curiously conjure up 'Borges' -- and the title of the piece is 'Ink, Oil and Mirror Gazing Ceremonies in Modern Egypt'. This fascinating text explains at length how the practice of seeing visions in ink (or some other suitable liquid, such as olive oil) was well known in Egypt across many centuries. (Worrell's article is nearly a century old now, of course; does the ritual still exist?)

At one point, he describes witnessing an inky seance in Cairo in March 1913. A magician sits with a young boy in front of him. Verses from the Qur'ân are written upon a piece of paper and placed beneath the boy's cap. The smell of burning coriander and resin fills the room, and sections of the holy book are read aloud. The magician knocks on the floor numerous times. A seal is drawn upon the boy's palm, and his hand is held over the smoke until the ink is dry. A pool of fresh ink is created in the child's palm. Smoke is fanned into his face, and the following conversation takes place:

Magician: See the ocean! Do you see a ship?
Boy: Yes.
After questions about the appearance of the ship.
Boy: I see a man sitting upon a chair.
Magician: Salute him.
Boy: Salâm 'alêkum!
After a pause.
Boy: I see a white appearance.
Magician: Say 'Bring coffee, O king!'
Magician: Has he drunk?
Boy: Yes.

Numerous readers of Ink Quest have collections of ink so vast that no bottle will ever be drained. Some, I know, have so many shades that they are unable to remember, when asked, if they own a particular colour. In short, inkthusiasts often have more ink than they can shake a magician's stick at. It sits there in bottles, pooling, reflecting, signifying nothing.

On reflection, then, it seems to me that we should take a leaf out of Borges' book and start looking for visions in our ink. The practice, I learnt from Worrell's article, actually has a name: scrying. The essay also reproduces the magic seal drawn in the palm of the boy who saw the ship, so we have all that we need.



Hold out your hand. Draw the magic symbol. Create a pool of ink in your palm. Gaze deeply into it.

- Do you see a ship?
- Yes. It has Penquod written on the side.
- What else do you see?
- I see a solitary figure on the deck. He looks grumpy.
- Salute him.
- I would, but he's shouting 'Go away and leave me alone'.
- Say 'Bring coffee, O king!' ... Has he drunk?
- No, he's spat it out and said that he doesn't drink instant. I think he's now shouting 'It's French Roast or nothing!'.
- We've conjured up a monster, a vile demon. Let the ink fall from your palm at once, child. Look away.

Yes, dear readers, ink-gazing has its risks. You have been warned. If you see visions that disturb you, don't come scrying to me.

Inks in palm today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil; Herbin Bleu Nuit.

Cover Story

Is there a secular way to say 'Hallelujah!'?

I ask because I've just heard a fascinating programme all about the word 'Hallelujah' on BBC Radio 4. Being devoutly secular, I usually piously switch off anything with a religious theme, but this particular broadcast was billed as a purely historical/cultural analysis of the word in question, so I decided to stick with it. I nearly lost faith when various hymns were played, but salvation came when the dicussion turned to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and Jeff Buckley's famous cover version of the song.

I know that what I'm about to confess is sacrilegious, but what the hell: I really don't care much for Leonard Cohen's work. Actually, that's not quite accurate. I think that he's written some wonderful songs, but I simply don't like the way that he arranges and performs them. His voice, above all, does absolutely nothing for me. (This is probably a little bizarre coming from someone who believes Bob Dylan to be one of the finest singers of all time, I know.) 'Hallelujah' is a perfect case in point. The lyrics and the melody are, in my opinion, exquisite, but I find Cohen's version of his own song virtually unlistenable.

It's become something of a cliché to note that Jeff Buckley recorded the definitive interpretation of Cohen's 'Hallelujah', but sometimes clichés are clichés because they clinch the truth. The Radio 4 programme discussed Buckley's take on the song, and someone -- the presenter, I think -- remarked that she could remember exactly where she was when she heard the track for the first time. So can I. It was the summer of 1994, and I had just finished my undergraduate studies. I had moved back to my parents' house, and I'd been eagerly awaiting the release of Buckley's first album. I bought it on a day trip to Cardiff, and I sat down to listen to it that evening. When I got to 'Hallelujah', I don't think I breathed for the seven minutes that follow Buckley's dramatic breathing out. See if it has the same effect upon you:



Almost fifteen years on, the song stops me in my tracks whenever I hear it. A colleague of mine -- let's call him Morty, shall we, dear readers? -- used to play it to a lecture theatre of around 175 first-year undergraduates to make a point about postmodern culture. I sat in on the event once or twice, and I have never heard a group of students sit so quietly.

But why am I telling you this? What has 'Hallelujah' got to do with ink? Well, dear readers, the programme's discussion of Buckley's rendition of Leonard Cohen's song started me thinking about the entire business of cover versions. I'm endlessly fascinated by the ways in which a song can change as it leaves the hands of its creator and finds itself interpreted by another musician. Bob Dylan must surely be one of the most covered modern artists of all, and some strange things have happened to his songs when others have recorded them. Jimi Hendrix's take on 'All Along the Watchtower' is perhaps the most famous example. What was a fairly quiet acoustic song on Dylan's John Wesley Harding album became, on Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, a fierce electric howl:





Less famous, perhaps, and certainly more strange, is the Neville Brothers' take on Dylan's 'With God on Our Side', in which what was originally a caustic attack upon American religious-fuelled war-mongering apparently found itself turned into something of a hymn. (That's how I've always heard it, anyway.) I can't find the studio version of the Neville Brothers' interpretation online, but I have managed to track down a live version, which you can compare at your leisure to Dylan's original 1963 recording. The crucial twist comes at the very end of the cover, when Aaron Neville throws in a line not present in the source: 'Jesus loves me, this I know':





But I still haven't told you what this has to do with ink, have I, dear readers? Worry not: the core of my sermon is coming...

It seems to me that we inkthusiasts are, when we fill our beloved pens with the latest colour to capture our attention, actually engaged in an act of interpretation -- inkterpretation, if you will -- that's a little like the act of covering another musician's song. You don't have to spend long browsing The Fountain Pen Network to see that lovers of ink often disagree about the properties of a particular shade. What one person finds slow to dry will prove immune to smudging after two seconds for another. What shades elegantly for inkthusiast X will come out a solid colour for inkthusiast Y. What flows freely for me may wither up inside your favourite pen.

It's clear, then, that we're actively shaping the outcome when we switch nibs, filling methods, brand of pen, or when we write with a different pressure. We're interpreting the ink, in other words, just as a singer might phrase a line differently when covering someone else's song. When we cover a sheet of paper with ink, we're actually covering that ink. (I don't quite know who's the original artist in this rambling analogy. Maybe ink is a cover version without an original, a simulacrink.)

All of this means, of course, that ink is constantly reinvented, reborn, reshaped, rewritten. Each new nib marks a genesis, a revelation. The soul of ink will never die. Take these words out into the world, my children, and shout them from highest mountain. Better still, use your sturdiest nibs to carve them into tablets of stone. Ink, that inkmortal substance, has survival covered. Here ends my covering letter.

Inks being interpreted today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Inkarceration

Someone must have been telling lies about me. These may be the last words that I write as a free man.

Well, I say 'free', but it's all relative. Let's not forget that I am constantly persecuted by the world and that everyone is out to get me. Including my own family, ink fact, and it is here that my terrifying tale begins.

The Inkette looks after Baby Ink at home on Mondays, so I asked her if, while I was in work, she could take to the post office a package containing a vial of ink destined for Seattle-based honorary Penquod crew member Anna. 'When they ask what's in the envelope so that they can fill in the custom slip', I said, 'just tell them that it's ink and that it's worth less than a pound.'

'I'm not embarrassing myself by saying that there's ink in the package', snorted the Inkette. 'They'll think I'm a freak, an inkoid. No, I'll lie and say that it's something else altogether.'

I became rather alarmed at this point, for I know that the authorities are constantly watching my every move, waiting for an excuse to take me in 'for questioning'. And because the ink-filled envelope contained a letter signed by me, I would, I realized, inkevitably be held responsible for the Inkette's crime against Royal Mail and the customs service.

But my troubles did not stop there. Later that day, the Inkette took Baby Ink to her parents' house, where he happily played for several hours. At one point, he trotted into the living room with the cordless telephone in his hand. It was taken from him and replaced in its cradle, but it rang some moments later. It was the police. A '999' emergency call had, it seemed, been just received from the telephone, but all that the anxious operator could hear was a small child babbling away to himself.

Yes, dear readers, my own son was clearly attempting to shop me to the authorities. Although he is barely two years of age, he has clearly figured out that 999 is the number for the emergency services, and he evidently thinks nothing of naming names ... even when the surname is the same as his. All that saved me is the fact that his sentences are still relatively inkhoate. I have no doubt that he genuinely wanted to say 'My father is an inkthusiast who has committed international mail fraud', but this probably came out as 'Car ... Digger ... Clarkson ... Teddy ... Bottle ... Mummy help?' (Yes, I regret to inform you, dear readers, that he is still obsessed by Jeremy Clarkson.)

But maybe the call itself was enough to set the red lights flashing in the bunker. ('Baby Ink has called it in. Lock and load, people.') Maybe the raid is about to take place. Maybe they're just watching for a little longer in an attempt to gather more evidence to use against me. (I will inkevitably, in the light of the well-known model of Esterbrook fountain pen, be addressed as 'J.' throughout the trial.)

I will do my best to continue writing Ink Quest from behind bars, dear readers, and possibly under the name 'Antonio Gramscink', but life will be difficult. The Marquis de Sade was famously denied 'any use of pencil, ink, pen, and paper' during his time in the Bastille, and I am sure that the biro-enslaved authorities have a similar prohibition lined up for me. I call on you, then, to throw vials of ink up to me in my cell. And not merely so that I can continue to write about the quest for the perfect ink. No, dear readers, ink will also be my means of escape. As I have noted in previous posts, the word 'ink' has its roots in what is caustic, in what burns. I will, therefore, place a few drops of our sacred liquid on the bars of my cell when the guards are not looking. The caustic fluid will gradually eat through the metal, and I will be able to leap to freedom.

Who needs a nail file or a saw when ink is at hand? Because inks are serrated, I will cease to be incarcerated.

Inks in use today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Bumazhnink

The Russian has been rushing in.

Not long after I posted yesterday's ramblings about my desire for a pocket book, honorary Penquod crew member Stefan informed me that Tolstoy's original text has Anatole removing a 'bumazhnik' from his pocket. 'Bumazhnik', Stefan explained, literally means 'paper holder'. Perhaps, he continued, 'billfold' would be a suitable translation, and he added that Anthony Briggs had clearly avoided 'pocket book' in his recent translation of War and Peace because the term has distinctly feminine connotations not present in 'bumazhnik'.

I'm fascinated by how complicated this apparently trivial issue has become, and I have no doubt that Ink Quest's readers will feel the same. The OED definition and Stefan's email have made me realize that 'pocket book' has shades of meaning in the United States that it does not on this side of the Atlantic. As far as I know, the term doesn't have specifically feminine connotations in Britain, but that's probably because it's hardly used at all. I've never heard of a woman carrying a 'pocket book' here. A 'handbag' or a 'purse', yes, but the latter word doesn't mean here what it means in, say, Stefan's native New York, of course. (Are 'purse' and 'pocket book' interchangeable, though?)

But back to the real question: where am I going to find a 'bumazhnik', a 'paper holder'? Once again, Stefan's email has suggested a way forward. In addition to giving me information about Tolstoy's Russian, he happened to mention that he has a special wallet that he uses when travelling by air. 'It's one of my favorite possessions', he wrote, 'with pockets, marked in gold lettering, for Passport, Currency, Landing Card, and Baggage Checks.'

When I read these words, I experienced a moment of revelation. I own a Smythson travel wallet that fits this description to an elegant gold 'T'. It's an absurdly decadent object, but longtime readers of Ink Quest will hardly be surprised by its extravagance, I'm sure. As I have noted in previous posts, I don't really like travelling, but I do get excited whenever it's time to prepare my travel wallet for a journey. I've often considered using it for the 15-minute train ride to work, ink fact.

It seems to me that the object in question would make a wonderful 'bumazhnik', for its various compartments offer plenty of space for storing letters and other ink-covered sheets of paper. The only problem is that it could never fit in a pocket -- it's 15cm x 25cm -- so its future as a 'pocket book' is a little doubtful. Will I have to carry it around in my hand, as if it were a handbag or one of those marvellous little bags that men are permitted to carry in their hands certain parts of mainland Europe? (That trend has never caught on in Britain, sadly, and I believe that the practice is technically illegal in South Wales. Viewers of Seinfeld will be familiar, of course, with what happens to Jerry when he dares to step out onto the streets of New York sporting a 'European carry-all'.)



Or could my travel wallet become a pocket book? I've often felt that men's modern jackets and coats (cue the old Welsh question, 'Whose coat is that jacket?') aren't made with sufficient attention to pockets. I am, for instance, currently looking for a new summer jacket, and I've found myself putting countless offerings back on the rail because the pockets are too small or, worse still, non-existent. There is, inkidentally, a lovely moment in Roland Barthes' Incidents where he complains about a new windbreaker that he's purchased while in New York. '[I]t fits badly', he complains, 'the sleeves are too long and there is no inside pocket, so I feel crammed with objects, at risk of losing them -- the way I lost my cigar case from this same jacket; already I am not comfortable this Evening.' (Don't ask me why he chose to capitalize the final word.) Like my great hero, I am not comfortable in a jacket if it lacks suitable pockets, and the inside pockets, I feel, are the most important of all.

I have begun to think that I will never find a suitable jacket for the summer; I am, for this reason, already eagerly anticipating the death of the leaves and the onset of winter, when I can once again dress happily (I use the term loosely) in my long coat. But perhaps I can kill two birds with one sartorial stone. I have always dreamed of having my clothes tailor-made on Savile Row, so maybe I should take my first step into the world of bespoke luxury by having a summer jacket made to measure. When the tailor asks me what kind of pockets I would like inside the garment, I will say that I need something big enough to hold a 15cm x 25cm travel wallet. ('Oh, and while you're at it, could you make space for three fountain pens, a travelling inkwell, some blotting paper, a bag of French Roast coffee beans, a bottle of Floris No. 89, and six volumes of Proust?')

Yes, dear readers, my travel wallet will, thanks to an excessively large pocket, become a pocket book, and I will be able to carry my sheets of ink-filled paper close to my heart at all times. The bumazhnink is born.

Inks in use today: Waterman Blue-Black; Noodler's Nightshade.

PS (4 June, 10.30am): Following a recent promotion at work, I have just received an invitation to a celebratory reception with the Vice-Chancellor. While I have no intention of attending, I couldn't help being intrigued by the dress code for men signalled at the bottom of the invitation: lounge suit. I'm not quite sure what a lounge suit is -- a colleague who also received the invitation has proposed that I wear a smoking jacket and slippers -- but it sounds like something that would go rather well with a pocket book. Everything's coming together very nicely, I'd say.

PPS (4 June, 12.40pm): A little internet browsing has revealed that a lounge suit is not as exotic as I initially thought. According to several websites, 'lounge suit' is essentially a synonym for 'business suit', so I suppose that it's used on invitations to make it clear that evening wear is not required. As I wear a 'business suit' to work every day, I could clearly make a seamless transition from office to reception with the V-C. Or could I? I'm a little alarmed by what Dresscodeguide.com has to say about the conventions of the lounge suit. Under 'Accessories', it declares 'Avoid novelty items'. My entire life is novelty items -- pens, inks, luxury notebooks, and so on -- and I regularly have at least one of these items in the inner pocket of the jacket of my suit. Beyond that, I find the suggestion that a watch is optional rather scandalous: a fine watch is, like a fine pen, absolutely essential (de wrist-geur, perhaps). And then there's the commandment about fastening the top button of the shirt. I'm all for crisp elegance, but I feel positively strangled if I don't have my top button undone. (I can't, incidentally, wait to hear what honorary Penquod crew member and bow-tie-defender Stefan has to say about the declaration that bow ties are 'acceptable but are very unusual and should be avoided'.) Lounging is clearly not for me, although I have to say that the term 'lounge' has a certain aptness. I have just checked the OED, and the term is possibly derived from 'lungis', which the dictionary explains in the following manner:


[a. OF. longis:L. Longnus apocryphal name of the centurion who pierced our Lord with a spear, by popular etymology associated with L. longus long.]

a. A long, slim, awkward fellow; a lout. b. One who is long in doing anything; a laggard, a lingerer.

I may no longer be slim, but I am quite tall, and I have been told on many occasions that I am awkward. I hope that there is nothing loutish about me, but I do my best to be a laggard and linger behind the ways of the modern world. Maybe, then, 'lounge' suits.

Out of Pocket

Is it possible to covet something without knowing precisely what that thing is?

I ask this question because I have decided that I want -- no, urgently need -- a pocket book. I'm not quite sure, though, what a pocket book is.

My attraction to this enigmatic object began when I read with racing heart the dramatic moment in War and Peace at which Pierre confronts Anatole about the latter's relationship with Natasha. 'Have you any letters of hers? Any letters?', asks Pierre, who has just threatened Kuragin the cad with a paperweight. We're told at this point that 'Anatole glanced at him and immediately thrust his hand into his pocket and took out his pocket book', from which an incriminating letter is retrieved.

Ink is mentioned nowhere in this scene, but I have come to believe that I, a defender of fountain pens and authentic ink, should be equipped with a pocket book from this day forward.

But what is a pocket book? To complicate matters, Anthony Briggs' recent translation of Tolstoy's novel has Anatole removing the letter from a wallet. (I don't know what the original Russian edition of War and Peace states; I will need to consult honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, who has a background in the field -- and who has been teaching me how to say rude things in Russian.) Is 'pocket book' merely an old-fashioned term for the rather prosaic 'wallet'? (The English edition of War and Peace in which I found the phrase was first published in the 1920s.)

In an attempt to find out more, I have consulted the Oxford English Dictionary. And what I have found (under 'pocketbook', rather than 'pocket book') is deeply intriguing:

A. n.

1. a. Chiefly in form pocket book. A small book, adapted so as to be conveniently carried in a person's pocket. In later use chiefly N. Amer.: a paperback or other small or inexpensive edition of a book.
Use of the word to denote a printed book does not seem to have been common before the 20th cent. The N. Amer. use dates from 1939, when ten titles were published in the U.S. in inexpensive paperback editions by Pocket Books, Inc., a company founded by Robert F. de Graff (1895-1981), subsequently an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

b. Brit. A book for memoranda, notes, etc., intended to be carried in a pocket; a notebook.

2. a. A pocket-sized folding case for holding banknotes, papers, etc.; a wallet. Now chiefly U.S.
In early use not always distinguishable from sense A. 1b.

b. A handbag or purse for banknotes or coins, esp. one belonging to a woman; (also) a woman's handbag for carrying everyday personal items. Now chiefly U.S.

c. fig. Chiefly N. Amer. A person's financial resources; funds.

3. U.S. slang (esp. regional (south.)) (euphem.). The female external genitals; the vagina.

B. adj. (attrib.). Chiefly N. Amer. Relating to considerations of personal finance, esp. as a factor in politics (see sense A. 2b).

Complicated, isn't it? And sense 3 does perhaps make my claim to want a pocket book rather intriguing to readers in certain parts of the United States.

I'm ruling out definitions 1a and 1b. I don't think that that is what Anatole retrieves from his pocket, partly because such an object probably wouldn't be large enough to hold a letter. Besides, I already have a Smythson Panama jotter which fits those particular decriptions:



(N.B.: The placement of my Aurora Talentum might look a little odd, but it is, in the name of anonymity, hiding my initials, which are stamped in the corner of the cover.)

Definitions 2b and 2c can also be discarded, I think. It seems to me that Anatole's pocket book is probably the kind of object described in 2a, but I'd like to believe that it's more glamorous than what we'd call a wallet in the present moment. If it's going comfortably to hold letters, like Anatole's, it will need to be larger than the standard wallet of the early twenty-first century, I think. Perhaps what I'm looking for is more like the object in which Tony Wendice, the plotting husband in Hitchcock's Dial 'M' for Murder, secretes a letter used to incriminate Swann:



But why, ultimately, have I fallen in love with the idea of owning a pocket book? Why has Cupid led me to covet such an obscure object of desire? ('Cupid' and 'covet', I have just learnt, are etymologically linked. Feverishly entwined, perhaps.) What would I do with such a thing? (I can already hear the Inkette wearily asking this last question.)

First of all, I like the fact that the object in question sounds archaic -- a pocket of the past with barely a hold on the present. I don't think that men are supposed to carry pocket books around these days, and this makes me determined to arm myself with such an item. If we start here, the theory runs, soon we'll all be wearing fedoras and cufflinks again. (And, if War and Peace is anything to go by, not long after that we'll be shooting rivals in duels and waving sabres at French soldiers.)

Beyond that, though, it seems to me that the pocket book has a role to play in the preservation of ink. Tolstoy's Anatole carries letters in his, so I see no reason why we modern wielders of the pocket book could not use ours to ferry around sheets of decadent paper covered with samples of our favourite inks. We and inky lines, that is to say, could go everywhere together, could live in each other's pockets. Ink would never be out of pocket (if I may use what the OED informs me is an American way of saying 'out of reach, absent, unavailable').

We could, of course, also carry actual letters, rather than mere scribblings, in our pocket books. And it is on these grounds that a pocket book becomes all the more necessary, for, while clearing out a filing cabinet in my office several days ago, I found a letter sent to me by honorary Penquod crew member Eileen in 1994. (We were graduate students together in those days, and we spent a great deal of time together, mainly gossiping, discussing the merits of Jack Jones' voice, and plotting a radical overhaul of British academia.)

I had forgotten all about this letter, and the events to which it refers are lost in the mists of time. It identifies an 'agenda' for a talk that Eileen was about to give in front of someone inspecting our research centre, but I have no idea what this speech was about, as the agenda itself was not with the letter when I rediscovered it. It's also impossible to date the document precisely, as Eileen has simply written the following at the top:



However, while much about the letter remains enigmatic, a certain key detail struck me as soon as I unfolded the forgotten sheet: Eileen had used a fountain pen and real ink. We spend most of our time these days discussing nibs and new colours (well, Eileen also manages frequently to change the topic to her lust for Britney Spears, Sarah Palin, and Charlotte Church), but I don't think that we ever discussed writing instruments in the early days of our friendship in the mid-1990s. I had not yet fallen under the spell of ink, for one thing; Eileen clearly had, but I think that this side of her character was still secret. She did, moreover, as she informed me a day or two ago, drift away from fountain pens into the dubious arms of rollerballs shortly after our time as students together came to an end.

In other words, the letter belongs to a time when we were not fully fledged inkthusiasts. It's strange to look at it today and to think that I would have paid no attention whatever to the ink fifteen years ago. Eileen has, of course, now asked me what shade she used a decade and a half ago, and I've reported that it's black. I can't be any more specific than that, as I find one black ink difficult to distinguish from another. Whatever it is, it's looking decidedly fresh fifteen years after being committed to paper.

But why is this historical document related to my need for a pocket book? It seems to me, dear readers, that I could carry this letter around with me at all times if I possessed an object in which to store it. I'd like to keep the sheet with me as more than just the mark of a special friendship. (Ye gods, the Penquod is sailing worryingly out of the waters of misanthropy and isolation. Must. Correct. Course. 'All hands to deck!' Oh, wait: there's no one here but me, as I've alienated everyone.) The letter is a reminder of the Days Before Ink, of my pre-obsession years. It's hard to imagine that I will ever be uninkterested in writing instruments, but Eileen's note is proof of my former inkdifference. When I first read it in 1994, my eyes paid no attention to ink; it's only now that I see form, colour, and shading alongside content.

And I feel that I need to keep the letter close in order to vaccinkate me against the easy lure of inkdifference. It's a souvenir from the dark days before I saw the light, and it marks a state to which I must never return. That way lie ballpoints...

Some wear a religious symbol or carry a holy book to protect them from the forces of evil. I, by way of contrast, am in ink's pocket, and it, if I can just find a pocket book, shall always be in mine.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Nightshade; Diamine Grey.

Drop-Ink Centre

Drop everything: let's talk droplets.

I happened to be reminded this week of the opening of George Eliot's Adam Bede:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

I can't claim to have read any further than this, dear readers, for I only have to see the name 'George Eliot' and I drop off to sleep. This antipathy goes back to my time as a student of 'A' level English Literature, when we were forced to read Silas Marner. Our teacher insisted that it was one of the finest novels ever written, and spent many interminable lessons discussing the eponymous hero's tendency to experience cataleptic seizures. This was, he insisted, symbolic of what capitalism did to the human spirit in the nineteenth century. My suggestion that perhaps Silas Marner had just been made to read Silas Marner was not well received. More recently, I decided to renew my dislike for Eliot's work when a now-retired colleague for whom I had remarkably little respect announced, in the week that Don DeLillo's Underworld was published, that Middlemarch was, and would always be, The Greatest Novel Ever Written. 'DeLillo's just a pretender', he sneered.

But back to Adam Bede. A colleague for whom I have huge amounts of respect drew my attention to this wonderful opening passage a couple of years ago, but, perhaps because of my longstanding feud with George Eliot, I managed to repress its existence until I saw the inky lines in print again several days ago. I know that I will never read Adam Bede, but I do think that there's something special about its 'inkipit'. What it recognizes so well, I think, is the possibility embodied in every drop of ink. With ink, we can go anywhere.

One of the things I like most about writing with real ink is the transformation of every drop of coloured fluid into sentences that didn't exist until I put pen to paper. Yes, users of ballpoint or rollerball pens can also turn a blank page into one teeming with meaning, but there's a crucial difference when a fountain pen is involved: the writer was responsible for filling the pen, either from a bottle or with a cartridge. In other words, he or she has come into close (sometimes very close) contact with the shapeless liquid, has placed it tenderly inside a writing instrument, and can then watch as the formless substance miraculously emerges drop by drop from the nib to find a form recognizable to all those who can read the language in question. To put matters differently, a user of a fountain pen has made the writing instrument capable of forming drops of ink, and is then intimately present as those drops drop into place, into shapes, into meaning.

The narrator of Adam Bede appears to recognize this: from that single drop of ink at the end of the pen can come a description of 'the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799'. From the fluid, a vision. From the drop, a universe. And all of this where there was previously nothing. The blank page receives the drops and starts to signify.

I am typing these words less than a metre from a box containing dozens of bottles of ink. (When did I last count or catalogue them? Will my urge to collect ever show signs of dropping off?) It's a little dizzying to think about how many drops lie within, how many words and worlds I could create at the drop of a hat, but that sense of inkfinite possibility is part of what drives the Penquod and prevents it from ever dropping anchor.

It's late; I'm fit to drop. Thanks for dropping by.

Inks in use today: Sailor Grey; Diamine Chocolate Brown.

Obviously Five (x10,000) Believers

Fifty thousand satisfied customers.

I haven't had chance to update Ink Quest this week, dear readers, as I've been buried beneath mountains of work. A full post about the glory of a drop of ink dangling from the end of a pen will follow, I hope, within the next few days.

But while I've been neglecting my duties at the helm of the good ship Penquod, the pages of this blog have received visitor number 50,000. A small drop in the ocean that is the internet, of course, but I like to think that each person whose eyes have found their way to Ink Quest has gone away filled with the spirit of ink. And misanthropy.

While you're waiting for the next thrilling inkstalment, you may wish to consider the two following items:

1. A fascinating response to my recent post about the writing instruments used by Roland Barthes in his Carnets du voyage en Chine.

2. A truly bizarre piece of plagiarism, in which a post from this very blog has somehow been merged with dubious adverts for bizarre items.

Perhaps I should ask the thief responsible for the second item if s/he could keep Ink Quest going while I'm busy. The list of blogs mentioned in his/her profile suggests that there is no end to his/her talent.

To the next fifty thousand! Enc(o)re un effort!

Ink in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown.

-caust and Effect

Is ink etymologically aware?

Colleague and honorary Penquod crew member Daphne called me into her office yesterday afternoon to relay some urgent news: she had been happily writing with her Sheaffer-Turquoise-filled fountain pen, admiring the delicate blue colour of her words, when the ink suddenly took on a life of its own. As she wrote the word 'Holocaust', she related, the ink changed from blue to brown ... and then back to blue again as soon as she began to form the next word in the sentence. She showed me the evidence. 'Holocaust' stood out on the page, the only non-turquoise mark in sight. Could I, she asked, explain the inkident?

I have known inks to change colour slightly if the pen is left uncapped and unused for several minutes. Waterman Havana Brown, for instance, often becomes a curious shade of green if the dormant nib is exposed to the air for a period of time. But I have never known a pale turquoise to become a burnt brown. Besides, Daphne had not put her pen to one side before the inkident occurred; she had, she said, stopped writing for no more than two or three seconds.

I have been thinking about this mystery all night; I have not slept a wink. I have weighed up numerous explanations for the dramatic eruption of the colour brown.

At first, I wondered if Daphne's pen was somehow connected across time to the Holocaust. Had its original owner perished in one of the camps, and was the nib performing an act of remembrance by highlighting the word? (Was it a Shoah show-er in certain words, in other words?) I quickly rejected this explanation when I remembered that Daphne's Sheaffer was purchased as new by her within the last couple of years.

I then moved on to a more prosaic hypothesis. Had traces of a previous colour of ink suddenly surfaced from within the pen and mixed with the turquoise to produce the brown? It's true that Daphne had been using a red cartridge before she switched to the blue, and it's also true that fountain pens are fond, if not thoroughly rinsed between colours, of producing some interesting new shades all by themselves. But I'm not sure that this explains yesterday's inkident. When Daphne showed me the sheet of notes, it was clear that 'Holocaust' had erupted in brown without the slightest warning or waning. The words on either side of the highlighted term were pure turquoise in colour; there was not even the tiniest hint of brown before or after 'Holocaust'. The emphasis was emphatic.



[NOTE: Dramatic reconstruction. Every effort has been made to preserve factual accuracy, but Penquod Productions Ink. has reimagined certain details.]

After hours of rigorous scientific contemplation, I finally discovered the root of the inkident: the root itself. 'Holocaust' and 'ink' are etymologically linked, cast together as words by '-caust', for 'Holocaust' -- which literally means the burning of all -- goes back to 'kaustos', the Greek for 'burnt', and 'ink' gets its name from 'encaustum', the caustic writing fluid used by Roman emperors, which in turn goes back to the Greek 'egkauston'.

My theory, then, is this: Daphne's turquoise ink (encaustum) became brown when she wrote the word 'Holocaust' (holo + kaustos) because of a sudden etymological collision. And the ink chose to register this fact performatively by making itself appear burnt (kaustos) upon the page. The inkident was caused, in other words, by -caust.

Now that I have solved the mystery, I can finally sleep. I am burnt out; I can burn the midnight oil no longer. These, dear readers, are the lengths to which I go to bring you the burning issues of our times. Thus ends today's burnt offering.

Encaustum in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown.

PS (4.15pm): As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Sitemeter tracker attached to Ink Quest gives me regular updates on who is reading the blog. I never know precise identities, of course, but I do get information about geographical location, ISP, length of visit, and so on. I am alarmed to discover that someone at the institution where I work appears to be making his or her way systematically through the Ink Quest archive, sometimes spending up to forty minutes lost in my deathless prose. This can only mean one thing: my cover is blown, and I am no longer anonymous. I have little doubt that The Management is watching, taking notes, assembling the case against me, and plotting my sudden disappearance in an unfortunate 'accident'. If you never hear from me again, dear readers, I would like Chief Justice Earl Warren to lead the inkquest into the Ink Quest inkident.

Which Side Are You On?

'Are we the baddies?'

I take this line from a sketch by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, in which two German SS officers suddenly experience a moment of enlightenment. 'Hans, I've just noticed something', says the one. 'Have you looked at our caps recently? [...] They've got skulls on them [...] Hans, are we the baddies?' Readers of Ink Quest not familiar with the routine can watch the whole thing here:



This sketch has been on my mind for the last couple of days, dear readers, because I have started to wonder if Ink Quest has spent nearly four years fighting on the side of evil, not against it.

My troubles began on Friday afternoon. My entire department had been sent to a conference room in a hotel for an 'Away Day'. (I won't bother to parody this event, as it managed to leap beyond parody all by itself.)



During one of the coffee breaks, I found myself in conversation with a colleague who grew up in Soviet-era Poland. We somehow got around to discussing ink (he brought the topic up, honestly), and he asked if my love of fountain pens went back to my school days. Was I, he asked, required to use an inkwell and dip pen while learning to write? I reported that I wasn't, and he then related how his schooling in Poland had been one filled with ink. (I don't know precisely when this was, but it must have been at some point in the 1960s, I think.) Each child's desk, he reported, sported an inkwell, and the caretaker would come around every day with a giant bottle of ink to replenish the containers. Learning to write, he added, was all about learning to dip a stylus-like pen into the inky depths.

I told him that this sounded like utopia, and I related how I'd been forced to use a ballpoint pen when learning to write in school. 'When I'm in charge', I said, 'those hideous creations will be banned.' What my colleague said next came as something of a shock.

Fountain pens, he announced in response to my desire to ban ballpoints, were prohibited in his Polish school. Not because, as I immediately suspected, they were the sign of capitalist, bourgeois decadence, but because they were believed to spoil children's handwriting. Only the dip pen, ran the rule, could produce proper writing. All hell broke loose, he continued, when his parents bought him a fountain pen and sent him to school with it. (I don't know my colleague well enough to know why and when he moved from Poland to the UK, but I wonder if his entire family was forced to seek political refuge here following the inkident in question. Were they sent into exile because he chose not to dip?)

I have always maintained that the ballpoint pen kills elegant handwriting. (Has anything but a simian scrawl ever been produced with a biro? The great Roland Barthes had it right when he remarked that a Bic was good for nothing but churning out 'pisse copie'.) But what if I've been wrong all along? What if the fountain pen -- the sacred instrument upon which Ink Quest relies -- is just as damaging? What if the only instrument capable of preserving the art of handwriting is the stylus-like dip pen?

In other words, I have been plunged into an exinkstential crisis. Perhaps I am one of 'the baddies'. Perhaps I have devoted nearly 350 posts to evil. Perhaps I've been on the wrong side from day one. Perhaps the Penquod should be sunk, the blog deleted without a trace, and all of my fountain pens thrown onto a bonfire. Perhaps we should let only the stylus style us. Which side am I on? I feel side-swiped.

Inks in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown; Diamine Majestic Blue. (These two new acquisitions are delightful. With the Chocolate Brown, Diamine has finally come up with a proper dark brown. It's not quite as dark as, say, Noodler's Walnut, but it's getting there. It's similar to Private Reserve Chocolat, but I think it's slightly darker. The Majestic Blue, meanwhile, is a lovely saturated colour that reminds me very much of the mythical Parker Penman Sapphire. Both inks flow magnificently and offer some wonderful shading.)

Scrap Age

Scrap everything.

Ink Quest has very little interest in political debate and current affairs, but an item in the budget recently unveiled by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has caught my eye. In an attempt to boost the ailing car industry, Mr Darling announced that motorists trading in a car of more than ten years of age will receive £2000 towards a new vehicle. Similar schemes have already worked wonders elsewhere in Europe, it seems, so the British economy will be back in the fast lane within weeks, I'm sure.

But why stop there? Why not extend the scrappage scheme to other commodities? What's so special about cars? (I ask this last question as the exasperated father of a toddler who spends every waking moment playing with, and talking about, cars. He has even taken to grabbing the 'In Gear' supplement as soon as I sit down with the Sunday Times, pointing jubilantly at the ill-dressed figure on the front, and shouting 'Clarkson! Clarkson!') Why not give the economy a further boost by offering cash incentives to people who trade in their biros for fountain pens?

This brilliant idea came to me yesterday morning as we were wandering around the open-air National History Museum in St. Fagans. (Don't get me started on the monstrous lack of apostrophe. This can only be the fault of the colonizers, for the original Welsh name was simply Sain Ffagan.) One of the most striking features in the hundred-acre site is the sixteenth-century manor house (known, for some reason, as the 'castle'). I was too busy chasing Baby Ink to read the explanatory text in detail, but I believe that the house has been set out as it would have been in the nineteenth century, so visitors step back in time as soon as they cross the threshold.

I, of course, immediately started to look for vintage writing instruments and related objects. I didn't have to look far, for several of the rooms contained rather elegant writing desks, inkwells, and dip pens. Before I could take detailed notes, however, Baby Ink's friend toddled a little too close to one of the security barriers, and the warning alarm sounded throughout the house. We weren't actually asked to leave by the guard who came rushing up the stairs, but we thought it wise to make our way out before one of the marauding pair destroyed a priceless piece of the past.

Seeing the inkwells in so many of the rooms of the manor house brought home once again just how much our relationship to ink and writing instruments has changed over the years. These days, whether a fountain pen or a ballpoint is involved, we tend to take our writing instruments with us as we move around our domestic spaces. When ink, at a certain point in time, made its way inside the barrel -- when the dip pen dipped out of sight, in other words -- it suddenly became portable. Before that, by way of contrast, carrying a pen around would have made little sense, as it would, generally speaking, not have contained ink; the magical fluid would have sat in an inkwell, and the solid writing instrument would have been repeatedly dipped. Who, under such circumstances, would have wanted to risk calamitous spillages by carrying a precarious, open inkwell from room to room? Keeping a supply of ink in various places around the house would have been much more sensible.

But what does any of this have to do with my scheme for rewarding people who trade in ballpoints for fountain pens? Well, dear readers, it's perfectly simple: my idea is that every house in the land has a fountain pen in each room. And each room, moreover, will have a space set aside for inky activities. I have looked back to the nineteenth century, in other words, and I can see a way forward through the stormy waters. If every household in this green, unpleasant land is strongly encouraged to buy, say, eight fountain pens -- with financial support from the state, of course -- the economy will be thriving in no time. And if the deal is that every ballpoint pen in Britain be traded in at the same time, then we'll rid the nation of biros before the year is out. (I realize that this is starting to sound a bit like something inkvented by Mao Zedong, but I have, in my defence, just finished reading Roland Barthes' account of his bizarre trip to China in 1974.)

Yes, dear readers, the Great Ballpoint Scrappage Scheme is hereby officially inkaugurated. From the credit crunch comes the triumphant crunching of biros into a million tiny pieces. The salvation of the economy begins at home (oikos).

There is just one problem: as far as I know, Mr Darling is not a reader of this blog. I will, then, need to take a trip to Downing Street to inkform him of my plans. I will write this entry out by hand on my finest sheets and with exquisite ink, and I will gather up every ballpoint pen currently lurking beneath the roof of Ink Towers. (The Inkette likes to annoy me by buying packs of ten.) When the Chancellor answers the door of No. 11 , I will proudly hand over my obsolete biros and the text of my historic Scrap Paper.

Ink in use today: Diamine Sepia.

Ah, non!

Happiness in all but name.

As I noted in last Thursday's post, Roland Barthes' notebooks from his trip to China in 1974 have recently appeared in French (as Carnets du voyage en Chine). It may well be many years before an English translation is produced, so I decided to order a copy from Paris and struggle through the text in the original language. The book arrived on Monday, and I opened it with great excitement on the train to work yesterday morning.

I was delighted to discover that the editor, Anne Herschberg Pierrot, has devoted part of her introduction to a description of the writing instruments and materials used by my great hero. It turns out that matters are slightly more complex than I initially thought. The biro-filled notebook that I have once seen is, it transpires, merely the first of four: Carnets 1 and 2 are blue spiral-bound Crown notebooks; Carnet 3 is a smaller, black, Chinese moleskine, complete with a quotation from Mao printed on the first page; and Carnet 4 consists solely of an index to its predecessors. (No information is given about its origin or make.) And the ballpoint scribbling in the parts of Carnet 1 that I have seen does not continue throughout: the editor reports that the books also contain passages written in felt pen. (Pourquoi, Roland?)

Not long after I had pored over these crucial details, I started to flick casually through the book. My eye fell upon a certain paragraph. Time suddenly stood still. My own surname was staring back at me. Barthes had written my surname. As its own sentence.

It's at this point that today's Ink Quest post encounters something of a problem. I have always chosen to keep this blog anonymous, and I am not about to out myself. (I have, in fact, recently deleted all of the information that used to lie on the right-hand side of the page -- interests, favourite films, and so on -- because it suddenly struck me as too revealing.) I can't, therefore, show you the moment in the Carnets where Barthes, thanks to what I believe to be a spelling mistake (I need to check this with my French colleague when I next see him), turns an ordinary French word into my (somewhat unusual) last name.

He's not actually referring to me, of course. It would be flattering to think that my hero, at the height of his intellectual powers, thought it necessary to drop the surname of a Welsh toddler (which is all that I was in 1974) into his Chinese notebooks, but even I know my place. Why, then, am I telling you this story?

Well, dear readers, I have been thinking about the heart-stopping page of the Carnets all day. And I had, until about ten minutes ago, been wondering if the apparent error of spelling is not cher Roland's, but a slip made by the editor or the typesetter. Could R. B., that most elegant of writers, really have been guilty of a spelling mistake?

Apparently so. As I was walking upstairs to the attic at around 9.30pm, I suddenly remembered that I have a book containing colour reproductions of some of the original handwritten pages from what I now know to be Carnet 1. I raced to the bookshelf and found the corresponding page ... where once again I found my surname. This time, however, it was in Barthes' own hand. And in blue ballpoint.

I take this as further proof that the universe is there solely to persecute me; that is the name of the game. On the one occasion that my hero writes my name, he does so because he's made a mistake and he does so in ballpoint pen. All I can find left to say is 'Ah, non!' Anon.

Ink in use today: Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo.

Inkvaluable

How much do you value ink?

I've always thought that 'invaluable' is a strange and dangerous English word. If I tell someone, for instance, that his or her help has been 'invaluable', I'm saying that the assistance has been so crucial that it's beyond words, beyond a nameable value. So far, so good. But aren't I also suggesting that it has no value, that it's worthless ('in-' = without, lacking)?

And my longstanding worry about 'invaluable' raised its head over the weekend when an envelope containing two vials of ink arrived at Ink Towers. It had been sent from New York by honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, who had, when asked to specify the value of the contents of the package on the United States Postal Service Customs Declaration slip (PS Form 2976), written '$0'. In ballpoint, as you can see in the image displayed above.

I must admit that I always find it difficult, when sending ink overseas, to come up with a value to scribble on the British equivalent of PS Form 2976. Does Royal Mail expect a mathematically accurate figure, arrived at by dividing this by this and that by that, or am I supposed simply to guess? Does anyone actually check these things? (I usually suggest something like £2 for a couple of vials, but I'm worried that there will eventually be a knock upon the door in the dead of night.) I have, therefore, been wondering about Stefan's specified value for the last couple of days, and I have found myself coming back to, zeroing in on, a series of crucial questions:

- Did he choose $0 because the ink contained within (Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo, which is a lovely blue, and his own magnificent Black Tulip mixture) is, as real ink, simply beyond value. Would no price, in other words, be high enough to match its majesty?

- Did he choose $0 because the clerk at the post office handed him a ballpoint pen with which to complete the declaration slip, thus negating entirely the glory of the genuine inks contained within the parcel?

- Did he choose $0 because that's roughly what one million pounds sterling (my local currency) is worth in the present financial crisis?

- Did he choose $0 as a form of protest against the ballpoint-dominated world, in which fountain pens and real ink count for nothing. (I am zero, hear me roar, in other words?)

We inkthusiasts know that ink is invaluable, but what do we mean by this? I've managed to come up with nothing for an answer, so I must have entered into a zero-sum game. The Penquod sails on towards nought, but nought tickles when you're all at sea.

Inks in use today: Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo; Diamine Indigo.

PS: As zero is in the air, and as honorary Penquod crew member Arty and I are going to see Bob Dylan tomorrow night, the following seems like a fitting Song of the Day:

All the Tea ink China

I've been peeking towards Peking.

While I was walking through the centre of the city on my way home from work one day last week, I was seized by the sudden desire to buy a bottle of Diamine China Blue ink. Luckily, my local pen shop was still open, and I found the colour in question upon the shelf. As I sat on the train with the ink held eagerly in my hands, I started to wonder why I had, out of the blue, been drawn to this particular ink, which turns out to be a rather attractive shade. (The punster in me, though, can't help feeling that China Blue ought to be a beige ink.) And I soon realized that Roland Barthes was to blame.

As I have noted in previous posts, the index cards upon which Barthes used to work reveal that the author filled his fountain pens with a delightful shade of blue.



Even though Barthes discusses his love of writing instruments in detail in his writings, I have never been able to determine precisely which blue he preferred; the colour on the card displayed above remains an obscure object of desire for me.

On the day in which I was driven by forces beyond my control to purchase a bottle of Diamine China Blue, I had been looking through facsimiles of some of Barthes' unpublished manuscripts and index cards, and I had, of course, been admiring the ink. Several days earlier, I had discovered, thanks to a brief piece in the Guardian newspaper, that yet more books bearing Barthes' name have been published posthumously in Paris. One is Journal de deuil, a diary of mourning kept by Barthes following the death of his mother, and the other is Carnets du voyage en Chine.

I will, of course, be devouring both of these texts, but it was news of the second that really caught my attention (and not just because, according to the piece in the Guardian, it records R. B.'s complaints about staining a new pair of trousers and failing to catch a glimpse of the genitals of Chinese men during his trip to China in 1974). I have seen one of the original Crown notebooks in which Barthes took notes during his Chinese travels, and I assume that the new book is a transcription of these scribblings. The pages of the blue spiral-bound pad are striking for two reasons. First, Barthes' usually elegant handwriting is decidedly unkempt -- often to the point of illegibility, in fact. But second, and more important, the notes are written in ballpoint pen. Yes, dear readers, that's right: petit R. B., defender of the fountain pen and hater of the biro, made notes in ballpoint pen while travelling in China. Something of a Chinese puzzle, n'est-ce pas?

Well, perhaps not. Maybe R. B. didn't want to take one of his precious fountain pens abroad with him. I, for one, never pack my favourite writing instruments when travelling; my Visconti Van Gogh is reserved almost exclusively for foreign trips these days, simply because I cannot bear the thought of my Aurora Talentum or my Stipula I Castoni being confiscated by a security guard at the airport. (I'd still be upset if the Visconti were impounded, of course, but I do think of it as my 'lesser Italian'.) Or perhaps Barthes was worried about a real pen leaking at high altitude. (Come to think of it, is that how he stained his new trousers? Did the Esterbrook 'J' that he mentions in one of his interviews leak and find itself thrown away en route? I will have to check these crucial details as soon as my copy of Carnets du voyage en Chine arrives from France.)

It was, of course, not long after I first learnt about the publication of Barthes' Carnets du voyage en Chine that I was drawn uncontrollably to Diamine China Blue. And even closer to the moment of purchase, I had been admiring the blue ink used by Barthes on his index cards. I can only conclude, then, that I had unconsciously decided that Diamine China Blue is the colour -- the perfect Barthesian blue -- for which I have been searching.

It isn't, of course. It's pleasant enough, but it's not The One. If my time on the Penquod has taught me one thing, it's this: the quest is unending. Or, as the handwritten notice at the end of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes puts it, 'One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.' The perfect bottle of ink arrives ... and always breaks into a thousand useless pieces. Like china.

Inks staining neither trousers nor the genitals of Chinese men today: Diamine China Blue; Noodler's Eternal Brown; Noodler's Violet.

PS: P's

P's appease.

I usually add postscripts at the bottom of existing entries, but today my PS, which is all about P's, has its very own Private Space. Honorary Penquod crew member Ken has been in touch to say that, having reread my previous missive about pretension, he has a Pretty Special idea: users of fountain pens should, to show their willingness to be branded as pretentious by the ink-loathing world, take a leaf out of Hester Prynne's book. Yes, dear readers, Hester's 'A' has become the 'P' displayed above, and the plan is that we parade around with the scarlet letter defiantly affixed to our clothing.

The 'A' stood for 'Adultery' in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale, of course, but our 'P' has the advantage of signifying in several ways. It could stand for 'Pretension', obviously, but also 'Pen' (or 'Plume', for those inkthusiasts based in French-speaking countries), 'Pig-headed' (in that we refuse to give in to the rule of the biro), 'Pedant' (in that we often like obsessively to have everything in its right place, much to the annoyance of the casual and carefree majority), 'Pest', and even 'Pervert'. (I mean the latter in a strictly etymological sense; I'm cutting the word off at its root, as Roland Barthes puts it in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. What you get up to in your bedrooms -- or elsewhere -- is up to you; I'm simply interested in inkthusiasts as perverts in the way that they turn away -- vertere -- from the dominant approach to writing instruments, turn it on its head, turn it bad (per-vertere). 'If writing with a fountain pen is wrong, I don't want to be right', as Ken put it in his message to me.)

(Scar)Let us wear our letters. Let us peel off from the crowd. Let the pealing of 'P' initialize the revolution. PDQ.

Ink in use today: Diamine China Blue. (The full story of my thrilling acquisition of this rather appealing colour will follow in my next post.)

The Great Pretender

Let’s pretend.

Tony Gilroy’s new film, Duplicity, revolves around the theme of corporate espionage. In a nutshell, Richard Garsik, played magnificently by Paul Giamatti, believes that a business rival, Howard Tully, is about to unveil a world-changing new product, so he employs a team of specialists to steal information from Tully. One of the purloined items is a sheet of paper upon which Howard has prepared a draft of a speech. It is handwritten. The script is elegant; the ink is rich. The fountain pen (a Mont Blanc?) used to produce the lines is big, silver, striking.

Garsik, however, is not impressed when he sees the sheet. ‘Who the hell writes with a fountain pen these days?’, he shrieks. ‘How freaking pretentious is that?’ (I’m quoting from memory, so the words may not be entirely accurate.)

I have, you may be surprised to learn, dear readers, spent much of my life being called pretentious. I have, it’s probably fair to say, hardly made it difficult for the mud-slingers. For instance, I once refused to take part in a sports ‘lesson’ (what’s to learn? or did they mean ‘lessen’?) in secondary school, declaring, as I have probably recalled here in an earlier post, that I was instead ‘going to the library to read Cocteau’. At roughly the same time, and for a period of around twelve months, I refused to wear clothing that was not black. (One of my colleagues who is just a few months younger than I am once said, ‘I bet you were one of those pretentious bastards who spent the 1980s wearing black, being miserable, refusing to go to parties, and listening to Joy Division albums, even though most of us were dancing to Wham!, drinking Bacardi, and having a good time.’ There are several grains of truth in this.) And then, in my final year at school, I formed, with a couple of like-minded souls, The League Against Dance Music. We wore the ‘smiley’ badges that were sported by the ravers (this was 1988 or 1989, when rave was king), but we had drawn a large black cross through the face. While our dance-crazed contemporaries listened to their repetitive beats in the corner of the sixth-form common room, we sulked self-importantly at the opposite end of the room and discussed surrealism, Camus, Wim Wenders, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, communism, French cigarettes, the Situationists, the nouvelle vague, and the quickest way out of small-town South Wales (by sedan chair, presumably). Pretentious? Moi?

Those moments are, I’m relieved to note, two decades behind me. But I have no doubt that the term 'pretentious' is still used to refer to me behind my back. (When does the teenage practice of face-to-face name-calling disappear? When did I start denouncing people only in their absence?) The moment in Duplicity described above does rather neatly put its finger on a widely held belief: users of fountain pens are oddballs, misfits, pretentious. (The same colleague who spent her teenage years living it up to the sounds of 'Club Tropicana' has regularly sighed 'Just get a bloody ballpoint!' when I have interrupted meetings by splattering ink and then having to leave the room to wash my hands.) If you take an interest in writing instruments, if you care about ink, if you refuse to use a ballpoint pen, you are inevitably seen by most people as affected, vain, pretentious. (Again, I have probably not helped myself by amassing a collection of silk pocket squares and luxury shaving creams, and by using a silver pocket watch to keep track of time while lecturing. In my defence, the latter was a thirtieth-birthday gift, and I cringe whenever I see colleagues pushing back their sleeves to glance at their wristwatches in the middle of a class. A subtle glance down at a pocket watch on the desk or the lectern is far more dignified, I feel. I could simply undo my wristwatch and place it in front of me, I suppose, and I have seen signal-conscious colleagues do precisely this, but I like the weight of my watch on my wrist, and I feel unbalanced without it.)

I suspect that most people dislike being called pretentious. But I have decided, dear readers, that it is time for us to embrace the term. And it's all the fault of Greil Marcus.

In Mystery Train's brilliant essay on the music of Sly and the Family Stone, Marcus suggests that something can only be pretentious if it's false. I can remember being struck by that statement when I read it for the first time in the early 1990s (when I was, no doubt, up to something pretentious). I was so struck by the whole essay on Sly Stone, ink fact, that I fell in love with the bleak There's a Riot Goin' On before I'd heard a note of it. Marcus describes beautifully, for instance, how the band took one of its songs from just a year earlier, 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)', and turned it from a happy, optimistic number into the bitter, lost, insular 'Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa', which is, in short, the sound of a once-uplifting band and a musical genius imploding. Curious readers may wish to compare Riot's savage reworking alongside the original (and sit in stunned awe at the solidity of Larry Graham's bass playing on the later version):

'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)' (1970)


'Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa' (1971)


But back to the pretension, to the crime of being false. I think that it's time to stand up for falseness in life. If it's true that the ballpoint pen rules over the world of writing instruments, and if it's true that real ink is on the verge of being forgotten by the general population, then perhaps the only alternative lies in being as false as possible. Yes, dear inkthusiasts, every time we remove a gleaming fountain pen from a pocket and find ourselves accused of being pretentious, we're actually negating the bland truth of Western culture with a flicker of falseness.

Long live falseness! Don't be tense about your pretence. Enough of the false prophets; it's time for the prophet of falseness. This is not a false alarm; it is a defiant step towards the false, a faux pas. Let our many pretences be false pretences. I am happy, with my array of false affectations, to be the enemy of truth. Through and through foe and faux.

Ink in use today: Sailor Brown.

PS (12 April): I have, in the light of a message from honorary Penquod crew member Ken, decided that a small postscript is perhaps needed. When I proposed above that lovers of fountain pens and ink embrace the label 'pretentious', I wasn't suggesting that we're all shallow, affected creatures. (I am, of course, but I wouldn't want to tar you all with the same nib.) I know that we ink-fingered inkdividuals truly believe in the inkherent superiority of a fountain pen that has been filled with well-chosen ink; we're not just trying to inflate ourselves by creating a flashy image, in other words. My aim, rather, is to reclaim something of the term 'pretentious' and to insist that, if the truth of the world is the reign of ballpoint pens, we might be better off on the side of the false. In other words, I'm suggesting that it's time to think about pretension as something positive, something of which to be proud, simply because it's the mark of being at odds with the general lack of interest in writing instruments. Think, for inkstance, of how the term 'queer' was reclaimed by certain groups fighting for gay rights; 'We're here and we're queer' therefore became a defiant, empowering chant. 'Pretentious' does not rhyme quite so easily, but I've come up with the following, which I offer as a rallying cry: We're pretentious, and it's tendentious. What was once an insult is thus now an inksult.

Restrainink Order

Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Ink! Ink!

Anyone who has seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho probably remembers the gruesome sequence in which Norman Bates frantically cleans the bathroom with a mop and a towel when he learns that 'Mother' has rather rudely butchered Marion Crane in the shower. 'Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood! Blood!', he cries when he discovers precisely what the troublesome Mrs Bates has been up to.

While the famous sequence in which Marion is knifed to death is deeply disturbing -- I don't know how many times I've seen it, but the hairs on the back of my neck always spring to attention as soon as Bernard Herrmann's shrieking score strikes up -- there's a sense in which I find Norman's mopping up even more unsettling. There's something truly horrific about the way in which he splashes the mop around in the blood-stained bath, then runs it down the side panelling. And the subsequent grabbing of a pristine white towel to finish off the job just makes things worse.

I usually like to model myself on another of Hitchcock's characters -- Roger O. Thornhill from North by Northwest, as played to perfection by Cary Grant -- but last night I found myself thrown headlong into the role of Norman Bates.

I have read many horror stories about what happens when you drop a full bottle of ink, but I had not, until yesterday, personally been through the experience. It was about 9.30pm, and I had taken a fairly new bottle of Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black into the bathroom in order to fill my Aurora Talentum. I had drawn ink from the bottle earlier in the day without a hitch (I was preparing a vial to send to honorary Penquod crew member Stefan), but I was not so lucky second time around. When I unscrewed the lid, the bottle slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. It didn't smash, but it did empty all but about half a centimetre of its contents over the pale wood. And the toilet. And the wall. And the hems of my trousers. And my feet.

Time seemed to stand still. The house was suddenly very silent. I knew that I had to act quickly, as the Inkette had gone up to the attic in order to send a few emails. If she came down and discovered the spillage, I knew that there would be blood and ink to mop up.

As I looked down at the mess, I realized that I had no real idea of where to begin. Because my feet had been splashed, I knew that moving was not a good idea. But moving was going to be necessary if I was to be within reach of something with which to begin mopping up the disaster. Suddenly, as the ink continued to drip from the toilet to the floor, I vaguely remembered reading something about surviving a chemical attack: If your clothes have been contaminated, strip. And so, dear readers, I carefully removed my inky shoes and trousers -- be still, your beating hearts -- and, just to be on the safe side, my jumper. I was now standing slightly back from the spillage in a t-shirt, underwear, and socks. The house was still silent, so the Inkette, I concluded, had not yet finished typing.

Most manufacturers of toilet paper celebrate the absorbent qualities of their tissue; they have clearly never used it to mop up Noodler's ink. My initial attempts to clear up the disaster area with Andrex toilet paper didn't really make much of a difference: within seconds, the paper would be saturated, and the resultant smudging seemed only to make the spillage bigger. Remembering Norman Bates' speedy recovery, I reached behind me for a large white bath towel. I dropped it onto the puddle and watched as it gradually became blue. When it had made a significant difference to the spillage, I drafted in a small sponge, which I repeatedly soaked and used to wipe away what remained. (I did consider dashing downstairs for a mop, but I decided that this might have alerted the Inkette to my desperate race against time.)

After about ten frantic minutes, the floor, the wall, and the toilet all looked as good as new. The towel, however, was ruined, and the sponge had become a dark blue colour. My trousers, I conceded, will probably have to be relegated to the category of 'Apparel to Wear While Painting', but my desert boots -- which are uncannily similar to those sported by Norman Bates in the second image displayed above -- are fortunately dark enough to make the ink stains invisible. (Praise be to Kiwi Multi-purpose Protector, too!) Exhausted, I stood back and surveyed the sparkling scene.

It was then that I noticed it. Just above the skirting board to the side of the toilet was an ink spot. I found a clean corner of the towel and wiped. Nothing happened. I dampened the towel and tried again. Still nothing. 'Out, damn'd spot!', I cried, but it refused to budge (presumably because it had fallen upon matt paint). Just as Norman Bates' clean-up operation is eventually ruined by a tiny scrap of paper that he fails to flush down the toilet at the motel, my perfect recovery had run aground upon a stubborn ink blot.

I decided that I should simply confess to the Inkette. (I did consider blaming the whole thing on Baby Ink or one of the cats, but I quickly realized that they'd all have flawless alibis.) She was not amused. Ink fact, she has banned me from taking ink into the bathroom. Yes, dear readers, a restrainink order has been served.

I am typing these words at 6.40pm. In around three hours, I will need to fill my pens in preparation for tomorrow's working day. But where will I open my bottles? Which room will fill in and allow me to fill in peace? To where can I and my colours run? Speak up and spill the beans, damn'd house! At this moment in time, I can see no way of sweetening the spill.

Inks eventually directed inside pens today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Common Blue-Black.

'I married crisis on the fifth day of May'

'Is ink your mid-life crisis?'

The Inkette asks me this question as our car is overtaken by a shiny, noisy sports car. Its driver is middle-aged, balding (or, as Elaine Benes would put it, 'clinging to scraps'), wearing a leather jacket and Aviator shades, and has the roof down (even though it's a cold morning in Inktown). He's been trying to overtake us for the last few minutes, and I've watched with amusement in my rear-view mirror as my deliberately slow driving and impromptu braking has made him angrier and angrier. He finally gets his chance to sail past us and on towards the twilight years of his life.

'Is ink my mid-life crisis?', I ask.

'Yes', replies the Inkette. 'When I first knew you, you weren't interested in ink and fountain pens, so is it some kind of weird interest that's developed as you approach forty? You're hardly going to take up extreme sports, are you, so is this your thing, your equivalent of that idiotic man's sports car, jacket, and shades?'

'You raise an interesting question', I replied.

I've been thinking about the status of my inkthusiasm ever since, and I've been trying to figure out if it's somehow related to the march of time, to my own slouching towards the point at which I'm supposed to lose the plot for a while, arm-wrestle with mortality, kick and scream against the looming of the gloaming. (But when exactly is 'mid-life'? Forty? Forty-five? How would anyone ever know the mid-point of his or her life? As the mighty Roland Barthes puts it, in 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...', 'the "middle of our life" is obviously not an arithmetical point: how, at the moment of writing, could I know my life's total duration so precisely that I could divide it into two equal parts?') And I have, after much deliberation, come to the conclusion that my obsession with finding the perfect ink is not a manifestation of a mid-life crisis.

This is merely because every aspect of life has always been, and will always be, a crisis for me. British television used to air an advertisement for an insurance company whose slogan was 'We won't make a drama out of a crisis'. My motto, by way of contrast, probably ought to be 'I will make a drama out of a crisis. And I will find a crisis where you thought no crisis could possibly exist. Bring me your molehills and watch me turn them into melodramatic mountains. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I will soon show them what misfortune is really like.'

Let me give you an example. Every day when I leave for work, my briefcase contains three fountain pens. I spend a great deal of each evening thinking about the colours with which I will fill my pens before I go to sleep. But I also spend a great deal of each train journey to work believing that I have made the wrong choice. Last night, for instance, the combination of Herbin Lie de Thé, Noodler's Prime of the Commons, and Noodler's Eternal Brown seemed like a winner. But as the train pulled wearily out of the station near Ink Towers a little after 8am this morning, a familiar feeling seized me. What were you thinking, you idiot? Lie de Thé and Eternal Brown are a match made in hell. Why don't you just open the window and throw your precious writing instruments onto the tracks? (It's not just ink, by the way. Not long after this kind of thought runs through my mind, I start to believe that my choice of tie and silk pocket square is equally misguided.)

It's not surprising, perhaps, that 'criticism' and 'crisis' share the same linguistic root. My problem (well, one of the many), I think, is that I subject details in which no one is really interested to absurd levels of criticism, thus provoking a general and ongoing state of crisis. For me, vast amounts of time and energy are spent trying to get things like ink, espresso, pocket squares, cufflinks, and shaving creams right. Other issues generally deemed more important by the wider world -- social interaction, professional respect, an opinion on the global economic crisis, for instance -- fall by the wayside as I weigh up the best brown for a Stipula 1.1mm italic nib.

And because I am so out of step with convention, there is little support on offer. I know, for instance, that I could turn on Radio 4 at 10pm and gather enough information to form a solid and untroubled opinion about the G20 summit in London or the situation in Gaza. Help, in other words, is close to hand. But where can I turn at 9.30pm for advice about the inks that I have chosen for tomorrow's working day? Yes, I could ask other inkthusiasts -- members of the Fountain Pen Network, perhaps -- but we're all as lost in the inkwell as each other, aren't we? Yes, I could ask the Inkette, but I know in advance what the response will be. ('You're going to look like an idiot whatever you choose, so it doesn't make any difference.')

But perhaps my eternal state of crisis isn't something to worry about. Wouldn't my life be unbearably boring if I wrote with the same ink day after day? What would I spend my money on if I suddenly found the silk pocket square to end all silk pocket squares? Don't I need the crisis and the relentless self-criticism to carry on? Some experience a crisis of faith, but I think I must have faith in crisis. (Could this wane? Could I one day find myself suffering from a crisis of faith in crisis?) Why confine the crisis to the middle of life? Embrace it. Let it rule all of your days. Hear my cry seize with love crises.

Inks subjected to criticism on public transport today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black; Noodler's Eternal Brown.

Inkvasion of Privacy

Make room for the camera.

British newspapers have been filled in recent days with reports about the arrival of Google's 'Street View' function upon this septic isle. There have, it seems, be numerous outcries about its 'invasion of privacy', and I have just read on the BBC News website that dozens of images have, in the light of complaints, been removed since the facility was launched.

As one who values privacy and invisibility, I was rather shocked to discover that Ink Towers appears in technicolor glory on Street View. Google's camera car must have sneaked past last summer, for the window boxes are shown in full bloom, and there is no sign of the Velux window installed in the roof towards the end of 2008 as part of the epic Ink Towers loft-conversion project. I have given thanks to the great ink bottle in the sky that I was not standing in the doorway when the images were captured. I remain inkvisible ... for now.

When I had finished being outraged, I decided to put UK Street View to good use by virtually revisiting some of my favourite British pen shops. They have featured here by name in previous posts, but never in images. And so I present you, dear readers, with a brief gallery of inky haunts frequented at various moments by the Penquod. (I have had to exclude Cardiff's Pen and Paper, as it is hidden away within an arcade. I cannot even show you the entrance to the passage in question, as the Google vehicle must have been forced to obey the 'No public traffic on St. Mary Street' rule.)



First up is Pens Plus, Oxford. This is perhaps my favourite British pen shop (although I should add that I have yet to visit Nottingham's legendary Pen Sense). I seriously considered stabbing myself with a ballpoint when, one Saturday a couple of years ago, we drove all the way to Oxford from Ink Towers ... only to find that the shop was closed for the week.



Webster's in Petts Wood, near Orpington. I believe that I have described in earlier posts my insane journey during 2005's blistering heatwave from the centre of London (where I was staying for a couple of days) out to Petts Wood, where the UK office of Sailor Pens had kindly sent a couple of 1911 fountain pens for me to try. I came away with the burgundy model. And sunstroke.



Ah, the luxurious entrance to the Burlington Arcade, London. Many expensive delights await within, among them the mouth-watering vintage fountain pens of Pen Friend. Some protest about the prices in the shop, but how much must the rent be in the Burlington Arcade? No trip to London is complete without a longing peep through the window of this charming little shop. And a second mortgage.

More inky images from UK Street View will appear here in time, no doubt, but for now, at the end of a day spent running around after Baby Ink, who has generously decided to develop chickenpox this weekend, I am going to retire to a camera obscura.

Ink in use today: Aurora Blue.

The Soles of Ink Folk

My kind of town.

New York, though, not Chicago. I love the Windy City, yes, and one of the early Ink Quest posts sang its praises, but I have always felt that I should have been born a New Yorker, even though I've never actually visited the city in question. I blame this on a steady diet of Woody Allen films, Seinfeld, and a line in Don DeLillo's White Noise about how 'the art of getting ahead in New York [is] based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way'. (Isn't that what Ink Quest is really all about?)

I have, therefore, always had a grudge against the universe for deciding to have me born in small-town South Wales. The last part of R.S. Thomas' bitter 'Welsh Landscape' sums my feelings up rather nicely, ink fact:

There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

And it was while I sat surrounded by 'sham ghosts' and 'an impotent people' last weekend, dear readers, that I truly cursed my non-New-York-ness. I was reading the Sunday Times, and I happened across an extract from the autobiography of Stanley Johnson, father of Boris Johnson, the somewhat idiosyncratic Mayor of London. I have no interest in either figure, but the headline caught my eye: 'Baby Boris: All Blond Hair and Dipped in Ink'. I was compelled to read on.

The ink in question formed part of a remarkable tale about the author seeing his now-famous son for the first time in the maternity ward (which was, we're told, in a hospital 'situated by the river around East 70th Street'):

I was told that the new baby was already safely wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the nursery in a cot, along with half a dozen other new arrivals. As I peered through the glass, I found it difficult to determine which our child was. The babies were lined up so that all I could see was the soles of their feet, which were uniformly black. Just for a moment I thought there had been a mix-up and somehow Charlotte had given birth to an African–American or Puerto Rican child. I asked a passing nurse for guidance.

“We dip the feet in ink to take their footprints as soon as they are born,” she explained. “We want to avoid mix-ups. You can’t use the babies’ fingerprints. Not when they’re newborn. They’re too soft.”

I have no idea if this inky ritual was standard practice in the hospitals of New York in the 1960s; for all I know, it may still be ink operation. But I do know this: British hospitals did not welcome children into the world with a dip in ink when I was born (less than a decade after Baby Boris). And dipping certainly doesn't happen now, for Baby Ink's identity was marked in the maternity ward in 2007 with a seemingly indestructible electronic device that was strapped around his ankle. Impossible to remove without a special key, this object would set off alarms and cause all doors to lock shut if anyone attempted to take the new arrival past the sensor positioned near the door to the ward. I think we have the device in his 'baby box', but, while I have a clear memory of the nurse removing it from his leg, I have no idea how we then got out of the hospital without the alarms activating. The mystery of the modern world deepens.

If I had been born in New York, then, I would probably have had my tiny, wrinkled feet dipped in ink not long after taking my first breath. While I have spent many of my adult years worshipping at the feet of ink, that is to say, I was deprived of the chance to get my foot in the door at the very beginnink of my life. I got off on the wrong foot. This, no doubt, is why it took me a while to find my feet with writing instruments, why I used ballpoint pens without objection in school, why I did not buy a bottle of ink until I was in my thirties. Because I was not born in New York, it took me years to get my feet wet. (This is surely why I am, like poor Marcel, always ink search of lost time.)

I am going to put my foot down and put my best foot forward: my sole mission from now on will be to convince British maternity wards to dip the soles of babies into ink. The National Health Service will, in time, come to toe the line. Ink will be there at the beginning of every life, and every child will naturally gravitate towards fountain pens. The ballpoint will die as people start to vote with their feet. The soul of ink will survive. Some feat.

Ink underfoot today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Café des Îles.

PS (21 March): Honorary Penquod crew member Ike has been in touch to inkform me that I am clearly onto something. He was, he notes, born in Atlanta, Georgia, some years before Boris Johnson popped into the world, and he still has a card from the hospital that displays his mother's fingerprints and the prints of both of his feet. (The practice was clearly not confined to New York, then.) A decade later, he adds, he received his first bottle of ink and a green Esterbrook J fountain pen. This latter development can only have been because, as he puts it, ink has been in his blood from the very beginning.

Comink Relief

I have been laughed out of court.

Today, dear readers, is Comic Relief Day in the United Kingdom. As those of you who are not based in this green, unpleasant land may not know, once a year we are all invited to 'do something funny for money'. All funds raised are then used in various campaigns to take a few steps closer towards, as the charity's slogan puts it, 'a just world free from poverty'.

One very common way of raising money for the cause is wearing 'silly' clothes to work. This, then, is the day on which a simple trip to the bank becomes an encounter with the cast of Toy Story ('Your overdraft has just plunged to infinity and beyond!'), or buying a train ticket takes twice as long because every transaction must be accompanied by a song from the cast of The Sound of Music ('The hills are alive ... with the sound of an overpriced ticket that is the result of Thatcher's criminal privatization of the railways!')

While I have nothing against raising money for the cause in question, I do find this yearly ritual rather unsettling (and not just because I instinctively recoil from any injunction to have fun and be wacky). I autistically like things to be the same as they usually are, so suddenly having to buy my predictable lunch from someone dressed as an armadillo is deeply disturbing to me. Ink fact, I try not to go out at all on Comic Relief Day. Stay in the bunker. All this will pass, just like Christmas, royal weddings, and the Olympics.

This year, however, there is no escape. I normally work at home on Fridays, but today I have to go into the office. Worse still, we were informed earlier in the week that Baby Ink is expected to wear 'silly clothing' to nursery today, ideally in the colour of red (to match Comic Relief's famous 'red nose'). At 7.15am, then, he sat downstairs and ate his breakfast while wearing a (red) Welsh rugby shirt (because sport and nationalism are silly), a pair of trousers that are too short for his legs, and several Comic Relief stickers.

As I studied his strange appearance, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. 'Why', I said to the Inkette, 'don't we hang a biro around his neck? That would make him look really silly.'

The Inkette took a sip of her coffee, sighed, and said, 'There's no need. He's your son, so people will automatically know that he's an idiot to be laughed at.'

And thus I made my own special contribution to Comic Relief.

Inks in non-zany use today: Conway Stewart Blue; Sailor Brown.

Book-end?

'What are you doing?'

The Inkette has just entered the living room, and I've spotted her slipping The Book of Ink into her handbag. (The Book of Ink, for those new to Ink Quest, is the small Clairefontaine notebook in which I keep a record of every ink that passes through my hands. The photograph displayed above shows the first page of the section devoted to blues. Obsessively curious inkthusiasts may wish to know that I have divided the book into 'Browns', 'Blues', and 'Other'.)

'I'm putting this notebook into my bag', comes the reply.

'But that's the Book of Ink. What are you doing with it?'

'I've been making some notes in it, and I'm taking it into work tomorrow morning.'

'But that's the Book of Ink!'

'The what?'

'The Book of Ink. It has all of my ink samples in it.'

'Oh, I did see some scribbling, but I thought it was just scrap paper. It was by the side of the computer, and I couldn't find anything else to write on.'

'Just scrap paper? But it's the Book of Ink!'

'So I gather. I'm still taking it into work with me.'

'But you can't! It's the Book of Ink! It has all of my ink samples in it.'

'So I gather. I'm still taking it into work with me.'

'But what have you done to it? Have you scribbled all over my samples?'

'No, I've just used a page at the very back of the book to jot down some points.'

I decide that I need to see the damage for myself, so I cross the room and take the notebook out of the Inkette's bag. My precious samples are still inktact at the front of the book, but, sure enough, the final page is now covered with the Inkette's writing. In a cruel irony, she's used one of my fountain pens to make the notes.

'Well, it's ruined now', I say. 'Years of work have gone down the drain. I'll have to start all over again in a new book.'

'But it's just ink', the Inkette wearily replies.

I'm about to open the telephone directory to the section marked 'Marriage Guidance Counselling' ('Hello. Yes, I think my wife and I are suffering from inkreconcilable differences...') when I have an idea.

'Fine. I'll tear out the final page, and you can then take just that to work', I suggest.

'But that will make the front page fall out. You'll lose your valuable ink samples'. The Inkette now seems to be enjoying herself.

'Okay, well, I'll get a Stanley knife and slice out the last page, leaving just a thin margin in place.'

'What a good idea.'

And so, dear readers, this is precisely what I did.



The Book of Ink will live to see another day, but I don't think that I can claim to have brought the Inkette to book. As far as she's concerned, it's still just a collection of pointless scribbles.

I offer this tale of horror and salvation because I know that many inkthusiasts who read this blog are in relationships with signifinkcant others who mock our obsession with ink. (The Inkette is very fond of calling us 'inkoids', for inkstance.) Should you ever find yourself in a situation such as the one described above, dear readers, you can simply take a leaf out of my book.

Inks in use today: Conway Stewart Blue; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

PS (12 March, 6pm): The Inkette has just read today's entry and has informed me that I have completely misrepresented her. She was, she insists, much ruder than I have suggested.

An Ointment

'I am writing on a table with a green cloth, lit by two candles, and taking my ink from an ointment jar'.

I have just stumbled across these words in a letter written by Gustave Flaubert to Louis Bouilhet on 1 December 1849. The young Flaubert, who had yet to make his name with Madame Bovary, was in Cairo; his infamous travels in Egypt had just begun, and he had recently sent his mother a note in which he likened the sand of the desert at sunset to ink.

I have suspected for some time that Flaubert was an inkthusiast. A previous Ink Quest entry recalled, for instance, some of the inky moments in Madame Bovary, such as the heroine's noting that arsenic tastes like ink. The hilarious Bouvard and Pécuchet, meanwhile, inkorporates a spillage of ink and revolves around two copyists who have fine handwriting. And the author himself only appears to become emotional about his impending departure for Egypt when he has to pack away his pens and papers. (See the travel notes relating to his journey from Croisset to Cairo for this latter inkident.)

The image of Flaubert dipping his pen into an ink-filled ointment jar that sits in front of him on a well-catalogued table is a wonderful one, partly because it has reminded me that inkthusiasts devoted to fine fountain pens and elegant colours always know precisely where their ink is coming from, simply because they probably spent hours considering which shade to use, and then filled the pen with care and patience. To love writing instruments, in other words, is to be aware of originks. Users of ballpoint pens and other pre-filled, disposal atrocities, by way of complete contrast, know nothing about where their ink (I use the term loosely) has come from and how it found its way into the pen. Their role in proceedings is minimal. They're writing blind, with history scribbled out.

For once, I know how they feel: one of my pens currently contains an ink without a name, without a past, without a source. How on earth have I allowed myself to wander inkto such terrible territory? I shall enlighten you, dear readers.

I was rather traumatized to learn last week that honorary Penquod crew member Arty had lost his Parker fountain pen. Perhaps in an attempt to negate the trauma, Arty reported that he was going to take the opportunity to upgrade to a better model. He identified a budget and asked my advice. I pointed him in the direction of the Pelikan M200, which is, in my opinion, the finest fountain pen available for less than £50. But poor Arty immediately found himself facing a problem: finding a nearby pen shop with a decent selection of Pelikans for careful trial is impossible.

I decided to break the golden rule of nibbery. Yes, dear readers, I lent him my M200 for several days. I can't say that I slept a wink during this time, but the anxiety was worth it, for Arty soon reported back that he was now ready to purchase a Pelikan. (He's actually going for the M215.) By the end of the week, my M200 was safely back in my hands and the world, thanks to my selfless action, contained a new Pelikfan.

My pen came back to me without a scratch, but Arty had refilled it. I'd invited him to do this if the existing Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon ran out, so I wasn't remotely troubled by his actions, but what did take me by surprise was the colour of ink chosen by the new Pelikfan. I very rarely use black -- ink fact, I believe that I have no more than a small sample or two of this shade in my collection -- so the sight of the colour coming from the nib of my M200 was most unusual. Beyond that, I soon became obsessed by figuring out the identity of the ink. Brown inks I can usually name at fifty paces, but blacks are unknown territory for me. I suspect that Arty used Parker Quink Black, but I might be wrong. Cross? Waterman? Diamine? (All of these brands are available in the pen shop that lies not too far from Arty's house.)

Not knowing the source of the ink in my pen -- or even its name -- threw my entire life into disarray. Yes, I could have emailed or texted Arty to discover the truth, but I don't think that being inkformed would have entirely restored the order of things. I am normally in obsessive, autistic control of as many parts of my life as possible, and I am accustomed to being inkvolved in virtually every part of the writing process that occupies so much of my time. Suddenly finding that one of my favourite pens contained an unknown ink, and simultaneously realizing that I had not been involved in its selection or insertion, catapulted me into the realm of the unknown and the uncontrolled. The origink was unclear. The 'I' in ink had become a little smudged. An exinkstential crisis, all in all.

From now on, then, I'll be keeping a close eye on the origin of my inks. 'Origink, therefore I am' will be my mantra. If I have to follow Flaubert and dip into an ointment pot every few lines, so be it. (But how will the flow bear up?) Ink fact, I'm going to take to carrying such an item with me wherever I go. And so ends the fable of the anointment of an ointment.

Inks in ointment pot today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil; Sailor Brown; Aurora Blue.

PS (3 March, 9.20am): A new honorary Penquod crew member who shall go by the pseudonym 'Ken' has been in touch with some crucial questions relating to the mysterious ink in my Pelikan M200:

What if Arty matched manufacturer of ink to manufacturer of pen and used Pelikan 4001 Black?

This is possible, of course, but I can think of nowhere in the city that sells Pelikan ink, and I don't believe that Arty has yet been drawn into the all-consuming world of inkternet purchases.

What if Arty used - the horror! -- india ink?

Again, this is possible, but I can see no signs of catastrophic clogging in the pen, so I'm pretty certain that Arty filled it with fountain-pen-friendly ink?

What if I cannot ask Arty to be sure of anything?

Ah, the postmodern condition. To be sure, I cannot be sure that Arty is sure of anything. If anything, anything is sure to be anything but sure.

What does it take to become an honorary crew member of the Penquod?

What are the thirty-nine steps? What is the speed of dark? Did you sleep well? ('No, I made a couple of mistakes.') I'm afraid that I cannot reveal the answer to this question. I think that there's a moment in an old Philip K. Dick novel, possibly A Maze of Death, where a character is able to ask any question he wants, with the promise that a truthful answer will be given. He chooses to ask if God exists. He's told that he can't be given a reply because wouldn't believe the answer.

Label -- damn! -- sans merci

Show ... and tell.

I promised in Sunday's post to offer a full report on my visit to last weekend's South-West Pen Show; I have now finally found time to put pen to paper and then words to screen.

Roland Barthes, my great hero, was apparently uninterested in the outskirts of cities. Whenever he visited London, he would always ask Annette Lavers, his guide and translator, to take him to Piccadilly Circus. '[I]t's only the centre of towns which interests me', he would say. I'm fond of what lies at the heart of a city, but I'm also fascinated by what lies further out, in the margins, at the limits, at the point where the city starts to fade away and into something else. One of the things I like most about arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, for instance, is the train journey down into the city through the suburbs, through the places where tourists don't usually venture. Am I, I always ask myself, in Paris yet? How about now? Or now? On my last trip to the city, in fact, I had to visit one of the universities miles from the city centre. This was both thrilling and disorienting. As I stepped out of the métro station and waited for the car that had been sent to collect me, I looked around and realized that I had no idea where I was. I could see none of the familiar Parisian landmarks. My pocket map of the city was useless: I had wandered off the page, out of the grid. Things only got stranger when I finally arrived at the campus to find nothing but buildings in the North African style. Before my guide explained that the architects had consciously sought to reproduce Morocco in Paris, I had been anxiously asking myself, 'Just how far have I wandered from the Bastille?'

Why am I telling you this? Well, dear readers, I discovered a day or two before the South-West Pen Show that the Hilton hotel where the event took place is miles from the centre of Bristol. Actually, I'd say -- without really understanding the finer points of the city's sprawling geography -- that it's located at the very limits of the town, just at the point where the M4 and M5 motorway interchange forms a mighty concrete barrier.



To add to the sense of strangeness, the hotel appeared to be marooned in the middle of an industrial estate, which, because it was Sunday, was deserted. I stepped out of the ink mobile, looked around, and wondered where on earth I was. Bristol, yes, but not the centre of Bristol, not the part with which I am familiar. I wasn't even sure that I'd come to the right place. Was the whole event a hoax?

The hotel's receptionist confirmed that the show was indeed underway, and I was directed to the relevant room. The air was thick with pens. I thought I could hear the sound of a nib being ground. I paid the entry fee and was handed a small adhesive label. 'That's your name tag', said the man. He must have noticed the expression on my face, for he immediately added, 'But you don't have to put your name on it. It's just a way for people to know who you are. If you want.'

I immediately felt that I was in an awkward social dilemma. I didn't want to cause offence by handing the label back, but I also have a profound aversion to wearing a name tag. In fact, I hate being called upon to identify myself in any way. I find being asked my name by a stranger deeply intrusive, and my instinctive response is, 'Why do you need to know? What difference does it make? Why is it any of your business?' I have actually taken to using pseudonyms in busy branches of Starbucks when asked for my name so that it can be attached to the espresso cup. I was 'Roland' a couple of days ago, appropriately enough. This is all, no doubt, part of my anti-social condition. If I surrender my name, aren't I agreeing to take part in conversations and human interaction? (Let me be perfectly clear: this has nothing to do with a sense of superiority. Trust me, you simply don't want me to be included in your conversations and friendly behaviour. I'll inevitably ruin things, so make sure to keep me at a distance. With this in mind, I have deleted the Ink Quest Twitter account, as I quickly discovered that Twitter is designed for interaction.)

When he was not busy exploring Piccadilly Circus, Roland Barthes taught at the Collège de France. In a lecture given as part of the course on The Neutral in 1977-8, he spoke of how any form of question ('What is your name?', for example) can be unsettling:

Now, what I want to point out is that there is always a terrorism of the question; a power is implied in every question. The question denies the right not to know or the right to indeterminate desire.

Any question, he continues, ‘entraps one in an alternative’: to answer or not to answer. And while the latter might seem like an obvious way to resist the terrorism of the question, simply refusing to reply, notes Barthes, ‘very quickly leads the one who doesn’t answer to death, erasure, or madness’. ‘What we must do’, he concludes, ‘[…] is to learn how to denaturalize questioning’, and he offers a wonderful example of how this task might be accomplished. In the summer of 1977, he recalls, he greeted a young woman in a grocery shop in Urt by saying, ‘The weather was nice yesterday’. In reply to such a comment, he notes, ‘one might expect yes/no (and rather more yes, since the subject is not conflictual!)’. He was surprised, then, when the woman replied, ‘It was hot’. This response, Barthes observes, ‘neither affirms nor denies the nice weather, [but] displaces the paradigm toward another paradigm, indeed another value’. The terrorism of the question ('The weather was nice yesterday, wasn't it? Answer me on my terms.') is thus neutralized.

Because the blank label handed to me at the entrance to the pen show was implicitly asking me two questions ('What is your name? Where do you live?'), I decided to take Barthes' advice. I accepted the badge, attached it to my coat, but left it blank, as you can see from the photograph displayed at the top of this post. I noticed a couple of people looking at it with slightly puzzled expressions on their faces, so I can only conclude that I managed to neutralize the terrorism of its questions.

I enjoyed anonymously looking at the pens on sale, and my mouth watered on several occasions at the sight of some rather decadent Parker Vacumatics and various Omas models. As it was my very first visit to a pen show, I was happy simply to be surrounded by so many magnificent fountain pens. A penoply.

I was, however, a little disappointed that there were not more varieties of ink on display. (The Inkette did wearily remind me that it was a pen show, but honorary Penquod crew member Anna put it rather well when she said that a pen is nothing without ink.) I saw one stand with a large selection of Diamine colours, but not much else, so I came away empty-handed. I had probably set my sights a little high, of course, as I had fantasies of table after table groaning beneath the weight of exotic inks not usually seen the UK. Perhaps what's needed, then, is an Ink Show. Pens would be allowed, yes, but ink would take priority. No one would be asked his or name upon entry. And the only labels handed out would read, 'Keep your distance'.

Inks in use today: Sailor Brown; Aurora Blue.

PS (4.20pm): A PhD student whom I have managed to convert to fountain pens, real ink, and expensive notebooks ('Ditch the biro or the thesis gets failed, son') has brought my attention to a rather terrifying BBC News story about the death of handwriting. Click here to read all about our frail faith, our craft or sullen art. Keep writing on those spindrift pages, dear readers!

Followink

Following up, briefly.

I awoke this morning to find my email inbox filled with messages from Twitter. Each one informed me that a named individual is now 'following' me. I can't decide if this makes me the messiah or the hunted, but it hasn't helped my habitual sense of paranoia and persecution.

Coincidentally, I read in the Sunday Times yesterday evening that the only people who use Twitter are those who have no real sense of identity. This seems perfectly fitting, as I've always been fond of a moment in Kafka's diaries where he asks himself what he has in common with other Jews. I don't even have much in common with myself, he concludes. (I'm paraphrasing; I don't have the book to hand.) I feel the same, and I have no desire to have a coherent sense of self. Identity is something to bury, in my opinion, which is probably why I spend my life trying to avoid myself. (As usual, a moment from Curb Your Enthusiasm spring to mind. Larry David, caught whistling Wagner, is denounced as 'a self-loathing Jew'. 'Well', he replies, 'I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.')

I don't know, then, what the Twitter followers are following. I seek to be nothing that can be followed. A ghost, it follows? (Inkidentally, I've always loved the fact that, thanks to a curious overlap between the verbs être and suivre, the French 'je suis' can mean either 'I am' or 'I follow'. Jacques Derrida makes much of this in his brilliant L'Animal que donc je suis.)

More to follow. À suivre.

Inks in use today: Sailor Grey; Aurora Blue.

Twitterink

Watch this space. Or a new one.

My detailed report on the South-West pen show will follow soon, dear readers, just as soon as I can find time to put pen to paper and then fingers to keyboard. Finding time to update Ink Quest is always tricky, which is why I have this evening launched Ink Quest on Twitter. This is in no way intended to replace the real saga of my ongoing search for the perfect ink; it is, rather, merely a space for me to give addicted readers something inky to nibble on while the inktrée is being prepared. (Twitterinks can be no more than 140 characters in length.) Click here or follow the new link to the right to be taken to the twitterink.

Perhaps this change of medium will rejuvenate me, too. I say this because I realized this morning that the punchline to yesterday's Ink Quest post had actually been used on a previous occasion (on 23 January 2007, to be precise). I hope, then, that twitterink from time to time will help me to think of some new jokes for this blog. Or perhaps I'm just in pursuit of a blue dahlia.

Ink in use today: Levenger Cocoa.

Ink Fashion

I always knew this day would come.

Ink Quest has, as longtime readers will know, devoted nearly 330 posts to the campaign for the return of ink to the realm of fashion. From the deck of the Penquod I have hurled missive after missive demanding an end to the reign of the ballpoint pen, whose 'ink' (I use the term loosely) is predetermined and hidden away, and a simultaneous rise of the fountain pen, whose ink is always a sensuous, dangerous affair. All I have ever wanted is to live in a world where real ink is in fashion and not the sign of eccentricity, abnormality, and perversion. (A world, in other words, where inkthusiasts are not mocked as 'inkoids', to use the Inkette's term.)

It seems that my wish has finally come true, for the fashion pages of the Weekend magazine inside today's Guardian newspaper announced, in the regular column entitled 'The Measure', that 'Inky Blue' is the colour of the moment. We inkthusiasts have won! The Penquod can finally hang up its sails and stop whining. My days of persecution are over!

Or maybe not. What exactly does 'Inky Blue' mean? I probably have around twenty blue inks in my collection, but no two are alike. And that's just the tip of the inkberg, for The Writing Desk has over sixty different blues on offer. How would anyone ever know, then, if his or her blue ink met the criteria for 'Inky Blue'? 'Fashion' and 'fact' may be etymologically linked, but the facts of fashion are hard to fathom in(k) this case.

As you can see above, dear readers, 'The Measure' displayed a photograph of Kate Winslet opposite the statement about 'Inky Blue'. She's wearing a blue dress, so perhaps the colour of this garment is the mythical 'Inky Blue'. I've examined the image under a microscope, and I've looked through all of the blues in my collection for the closest match. I think that Aurora Blue is the winner, and I'm thanking my lucky stars that I ordered a bottle of this wonderful ink from The Writing Desk a week or two ago. As chance would have it, my Aurora Talentum is currently filled with the colour and has been making some beautiful lines today. I am the height of fashion.

But what if I'm wrong? What if I'm pinning all of my hopes to the wrong blue? What if Aurora Blue is not actually worthy of the blue ribbon? I am already sliding into a blue funk, partly because Newman, one of my three cats, has been sitting on my lap and biting my hands while I've been trying to type these words. Has he been trying to signal the error of my ways and to stop me posting this entry, or does he simply have the personality of the Seinfeld character after whom he's named? (The other two, Kramer and George, behave exactly like their sitcom namesakes.) Cats have remarkable powers of vision, after all, so perhaps he knows which of my inks really deserves the label 'Inky Blue'.

There is only one solution: buy more blue ink. And I know just where to go. Tomorrow, dear readers, the Penquod will strike out into the blue water and head for the outskirts of Bristol, where the South West Pen Show is taking place. This will be my first visit to any kind of pen show, so I'm rather excited (and also saddened to learn that honorary Penquod crew member Eileen will not be able to meet me there). I will, of course, report in full; I just hope that I'm not in search of a blue dahlia.

Ink in use today: Inky Blue?

XXX Penography XXX

Ink takes all sorts.

I've mentioned in previous posts, dear readers, how I use the marvellous Sitemeter to keep track of how many people visit this humble blog devoted to the quest for the perfect ink. I don't think that this can be explained in terms of megalomania (although Woody Allen's line about starting out life in Judaism and later converting to narcissism does spring to mind); it's more to do with idle wondering about who on earth reads this rubbish, where these deranged readers come from, and so on.

One of the most endlessly fascinating things about the information provided by Sitemeter are the words typed into search engines -- Google, usually -- which have led certain visitors to Ink Quest. As I think I've noted in the past, 'How do I remove biro from a cheque?' and 'What kind of ink is used on banknotes?' are fairly common, as are more obviously relevant phrases such as 'Noodler's ink shading properties'. Until now, I've never been disturbed by what people have been searching for -- many of the requests are hilariously irrelevant to this blog -- but two separate Google searches undertaken yesterday did leave me feeling rather uneasy.

The first came from a computer that was obviously in some kind of stealth mode, for, as you can see in the image displayed above, Sitemeter was not able to determine its ISP or geographical location. (The fact that Google.jo was used, however, leads me to believe that the request came from Jordan.) And the secrecy makes perfect sense, I suppose, when you observe, dear readers, that the Google user was in search of 'websites for child penography'. Yes, that's right: 'child penography'. I am fairly sure that this illiterate individual would have been disappointed by the contents of Ink Quest. Yes, this is, now that the neologism has been handed to me on a (rather unsavoury) plate, a blog devoted to penography, but I don't think that pens and ink are what the person was really looking for. On Valentine's Day.

I have a little more information about the second strange Google request that led to Ink Quest, but matters are actually even more baffling. I know that someone in the state of New Jersey entered the words 'clairefontaine france stationery jew' into the search engine at 10.01pm, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what prompted such a phrase to be typed. 'clairefontaine france stationery' would have been entirely unproblematic, and anyone merely wanting to know more about the magnificent paper would perhaps find various posts here helpful. But it's the 'jew' at the end that puzzles me. What's the link -- if any -- between Clairefontaine and Judaism? And why was the person who entered those words into Google interested in finding out more about the apparent connection? Has my blog been visited by someone who believes in some all-encompassing Zionist conspiracy? Does he or she think that the Jews control the world's paper supplies?

All of my question will remain unanswered. This, I suppose, is simply what happens when you run a blog to which anyone with a computer could theoretically have access. Once the words are out there in cyberspace, anything can happen. So, while the apparent paedophiles and the possibly anti-Semitic come and go, I'll just keep writing about ink and peddling the hardcore penography in praise of how mighty the pen is. (The last two words of that sentence ought to bring in a bit more dubious traffic.)

Ink in use today: Aurora Blue.

Trance Ended

I believed I'd transcended.

The day began with a moment of magic. I usually read on the train to work, but this morning I sat with my iPod treating me to the sounds of the new Van Morrison album, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. I have mentioned in many previous posts my love of Van Morrison's work, particularly the early masterpieces such as Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. Those two albums in particular have been constant presences in my life ever since I discovered them in 1990; there's not a note, not a whisper, that I don't know.

I was, therefore, beside myself with excitement on Monday when the recording of the fortieth-anniversary Astral Weeks live shows -- the first time that Morrison had ever played the album in its entirety in concert -- finally went on sale, and I've been listening with a sense of wonder all week. There are simply too many magical moments to discuss here, but I will single out one heart-stopping instant when, towards the end of the title track, Morrison takes the band's volume right down. (Anyone who's ever seen him live will know the kind of semi-silence I'm talking about. When old friend Nixon and I saw him in San Francisco in 1993, he faded 'Sweet Thing' until you could have heard a pin drop, and then slipped seamlessly into a sublime, epic 'My Lagan Love'. On another occasion -- I can't remember where or when -- I watched in astonishment as 'Summertime in England' became so quiet that Morrison actually told the band to step away from the microphones to take things down further; the members of the horn section then stepped off the stage and walked through the audience, playing softly as they went.) After the familiar lyrics to 'Astral Weeks' have ended, he adds something new to the calm: he simply repeats the words 'I believe I've transcended' over and over again.

I happened to reach this point in the song just as my train was halfway across the bridge over the Taff. (Curious readers can click here, here, here, or here to see photographs -- not taken by me, I should add -- of the river and the very bridge over which my train was crossing.) At the precise moment when I heard 'I believe I've transcended', the bright morning sun flashed on the water and lit up the world. Synchronicity. I believed I'd transcended.

This glorious moment set the morning up rather well. When I got into the office and unpacked my pens, I found that my choice of inks for the day (Noodler's Nightshade; Diamine Indigo; Diamine Royal Blue) somehow felt right. (There have been many occasions when, although I've liked as separate entities the various colours chosen, their juxtaposition hasn't quite worked and has ruined my day.) I believed I'd transcended.

More specifically, I believed I'd transcended what I once heard Van Morrison call 'mundane reality'. He was being interviewed for a wonderful episode of The South Bank Show entitled 'Clear Cool Crystal Streams'. The theme was Irish music, and various musicians were called upon to discuss the place of their own work within the larger national tradition. Bob Geldof was sent to speak to Morrison, who was asked at one point about the influence of Patrick Kavanagh's poetry. (Morrison once set Kavanagh's 'Raglan Road' to music. He also spoke to Geldof about the influence of Beckett and quoted the famous 'I can't go on, I'll go on' line from The Unnamable; if only that had been given the Morrison musical treatment.) I may not be quoting entirely accurately, but I'm pretty sure that Morrison said he was inspired by Kavanagh's attempt to achieve 'transcendence of mundane reality'. 'Raglan Road' is just the name of an ordinary street, in other words, but by the time the poem's finished with it, it's much more than that. By the same token, Van Morrison's 'Cyprus Avenue' is about far, far more than merely the Belfast street of that name. They've transcended.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about my moment of transcendence that ink's appeal lies precisely in its ability to bring about a 'transcendence of mundane reality'. As I believe I've noted in previous posts, my job is one that requires me to spend a great deal of time with a pen in my hand, taking notes and writing dull, pointless academic texts that no one in his or her right mind would ever care about. It's the ink and the ink alone, I think, that keeps me going: only by regularly changing colours can I hope to achieve transcendence of my mundane reality. I ink, therefore I am.

Transcendence never lasts, though, does it? You can climb up for a moment -- transcendence, etymologically, is all about climbing -- but the weight of mundane reality will always pull you down. And, sure enough, my transcendence soon came to an end.

Not long after I'd returned to my office from the library, where I'd been taking notes and taking delight in the appearance of the Noodler's Nightshade upon Clairefontaine paper, I unscrewed the barrel of my Aurora Talentum to check how much Nightshade remained in the converter. This is when things started to go wrong, for I immediately noticed that the pen was leaking. And not just a gentle drizzle: ink actually poured out of the pen onto my hands. (I still have traces of Nightshade beneath the fingernail of my left index finger. It's most unbecoming.) My training from the Ink Academy immediately kicked in, and I grabbed a plastic bag for urgent quarantining of the pen. I then ran along the corridor, knocking students out of the way as I went (Code 17, people! Lock the building down! Inkjured officer coming through!), and somehow managed to make it to a sink without ruining my new grey suit.

Photographic evidence of the quarantined object is displayed above. I'm a little scared to open the bag, and not just because there will inkevitably be another airborne toxic event when I unscrew the barrel. What if there is something seriously wrong with my beloved Aurora? What if it's ready for the final transcendence? What if it will not live to see another aurora? I think, on reflection, that I will leave the pen in quarantine for forty days. (That's what 'quarantine' actually means, after all.) Maybe a brief spell in the wilderness will lead to some kind of transcendent miracle.

I am firmly back in the realm of mundane reality. Ink lifted me up ... and ink soon brought me back down to earth. I believed I'd transcended, but soon the trance ended.

Ink in use today: Diamine Indigo; Diamine Royal Blue.
Ink under fingernail today: Noodler's Nightshade.

Sophink's Choice

I have nothing but cold words for you today, dear readers.

'How', I hear you cry, 'is that any different from the usual frosty, anti-social, misanthropic way of things at Ink Quest?' Well, I mean it literally on this occasion. My words are cold. The ink that formed them was close to freezing.

Just as Britain was plunged into its coldest, snowiest spell for nearly two decades, the boiler at Ink Towers chose to fail, leaving us entirely without central heating from Sunday evening until this morning, when the British Gas engineer, who had been waiting for an exotically named object known as an 'expansion vessel' to arrive, finally restored the heat. While the entire nation was brought to its knees by a few snowflakes, we huddled and shivered around a single electric heater that the Inkette had managed to borrow. (The country's inability to cope with a few centimetres of snow has been truly hilarious. A Canadian graduate student of mine expressed his utter incredulity at the fiasco. 'This isn't snow!', he declared, just as the national stocks of road salt ran perilously low after about half an hour. 'What's wrong with you people?' Having witnessed last March Montréal's remarkable ability to carry on as normal in the face of proper snow, I feel he has a point.)

The arrival of the lone, life-saving heater in the freezing Ink Towers raised something of a dilemma, however. A dilemma that I came to call Sophink's Choice.

The Inkette suggested that we should use the object to heat Baby Ink's bedroom before he went to sleep, and then -- having wrapped him in two sets of pyjamas, a sleeping bag, and a duvet -- move it to our room. I was about to say 'Good idea', but my mind suddenly turned to my collection of ink, which now resides in a large wooden box in the attic room. Without heating, that loft space can get very cold very quickly, and it occurred to me that my ink might freeze and be ruined. 'Or maybe I could put the heater up in the loft to keep my ink safe...', I found myself saying to the Inkette.

Fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm will probably remember the moment near the beginning of the sixth series when Larry makes a mistake that sends his marriage to Cheryl crashing onto the rocks. Cheryl is on board a plane which looks as if it is about to plummet to the ground, so she rings him from her seat to profess undying love. He, however, is in the middle of having the home entertainment system fixed by 'the TiVo guy', so he asks her if she can call back in ten minutes. I can't find the whole scene on YouTube, but you can see part of it beginning at roughly 0:30 in the following clip:



Let's just say that the Inkette responded to my suggestion about the placement of the heater in a manner strikingly similar to Cheryl David when she eventually arrived home. What the Inkette failed to understand, however, is that I was being called upon to make a choice every bit as difficult as Sophie's Choice. 'Don't make me choose! I can't choose!', I cried as the dilemma (heat the ink or heat Baby Ink's room) reared up in front me.

In the end, and in the shadow of the possibility that I would not live to see our tenth wedding anniversary in March, Sophink's Choice was made in favour of Baby Ink, who settled down for sleep in a cosy room. 'One day', I whispered to him as he drank his milk, 'I will tell you the tale of how I bravely and selflessly chose you over a stack of bottles of coloured liquid.' Above my head in the attic as I read him bedtime stories ('Once upon a time, there was an evil woman who destroyed her husband's ink collection...'), however, I was sure that I could hear ice crystals forming in the ink, glass cracking, colours dripping. Sounds that make the blood of any inkthusiast run cold.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.

Inkdex

Ink, again, is an index to death.

Mortality, as regular readers of this jaunty blog will know, is never far from my thoughts, but it feels closer than usual today. This is not just because the news has been filled with reports of the sad loss of John Updike. (Like Nicholson Baker, author of the magnificent tribute to Updike, U and I, I cannot claim to have read all of the author's books. But what I have read, I have loved, especially the Rabbit novels and 'Rabbit Remembered', the brief story-length epilogue set after the hero's death.) No, dear readers, death has been brought near today by ink and a piece of card.

One of my tasks for the day was to write a reference (I believe that Ink Quest's many American readers will know such a thing better as a letter of recommendation) for a former student of mine. I probably write between fifty and hundred of these for different people in the course of a year, so it's a perfectly routine activity. Well, usually. Because the student in question graduated something like a decade ago, his record card -- to which I wanted to refer in order to check his grades -- is no longer kept in the main departmental offices; I was, rather, required to walk further down the corridor to the somewhat mysterious room where all of the older cards are filed in several large cabinets.

Even though I have been teaching in the department for around ten years, I have never, until today, had occasion to delve into this dusty archive. As soon as I opened the drawers and started searching for the card, I found myself floating freely across history, for the archived items are not stored by graduating year; they're simply alphabetized in one giant ahistorical sequence, so it's possible while flicking through, say, the records for former students whose surnames begin (or began -- a distinction to which I will return) with 'A' to see faces and names from any year going back to something like the late 1940s. (The university is older than that, but I saw no cards from earlier periods.)

When I eventually found the card I needed, I removed it from the drawer, but it somehow attached itself to its neighbour, which meant that I suddenly found myself looking at a photograph of a student who entered the university in 1951. The first thing I noticed about the picture was how well dressed the individual was. His hair was slicked down, he was cleanly shaven and smiling politely, and he wore an elegant suit and tie. For a brief moment, I wondered if I was looking at a member of the cast of Brideshead Revisited. It is almost impossible to imagine a male student of 2009 dressing so formally for the photograph to be handed over to the department on enrolment. I'm far too old to know how to describe the student fashions of today, but I can at least see that they're usually as informal as possible. In many cases, the idea seems (to my wrinkled and squinting eye) to be to look as nonchalant and ungroomed as possible on the record card. (I got the grades you required of me, but don't expect me to shine my shoes or shave my face, mister. I'm stickin' it to The Man all the way to graduation.)

When I'd got over the shock of the picture, I noticed the ink and the handwriting that had, over half a century ago, recorded the student's details and performance in examinations. They were both, in short, things of utter beauty. The letters were immaculately formed, vivacious, precisely linked, and instantly conjured up a period when proper penmanship was prized in British schools. The ink, meanwhile, was a gorgeously deep blue-black that showed no signs of weathering. I can think of no modern blue-black with the same kind of quiet nuance.

My first thought was to ask a more senior member of the department to whom the handwriting belonged. But I quickly realized that, if the striking letters had been formed fifty-eight years ago, none of my colleagues could possibly know the answer to the question. And then it really hit me: the person who had made such delightfully lively inky marks upon the piece of card is almost certainly no longer among the living. Even if the individual was a recently appointed junior lecturer in 1951, he or she must have been close to thirty at the time. (I suspect, however, that the maker of the marks was older than that, for the style of the letters reminds me of grandmother's handwriting, and she would be 103 if she were alive today.)

This bristle of mortality led me to wonder about the student whose name and photograph adorned the card. If he was eighteen years of age in 1951 (is that when people became university students back then, or did National Service come first?), he would now be seventy-six. That's not really ancient by modern standards, so there's a chance that he's still out there somewhere, still dressing like a true gentleman, still looking back fondly at his university years. Even if he is, though, there was something rather unsettling about looking at the photograph of his youthful face. That frozen, voiceless moment from nearly sixty years ago is all I will ever see, all I will ever know. What happened next is a mystery. I wouldn't know him if I passed him in the street tomorrow, for I am only familiar with his face as it was in 1951. The photograph has removed him from the frame of life.

Surrounded by all of this death, of course, the blue-black ink sat mocking. Unlike the subject whose name it formed upon the index card, unlike the owner of the pen from which it flowed, it is -- fire and floods aside -- immortal. And that undying quality merely underscores the mortality of the student and the writer. You can run, rabbit, but you can't hide. All human fingers turn to dust, and ink remains the index.

Ink used for epitaphs today: Omas Sepia.

PS (29 January): They keep on dropping this week. I read a few moments ago that John Martyn has followed John Updike into the nothingness. Just as I have not read all of Updike's books, I have not heard all of Martyn's albums, but Solid Air has long been one of my favourites, and 'Small Hours' (from One World) does sublime things with an acoustic guitar, an echo unit, and a volume pedal. All love songs should, I feel, contain the line, 'Say you'll be my ruin':

Panoptinkon

My inkconscious has been busy.

While I was asleep last night, my unconscious mind made it perfectly clear that it was not entirely happy with yesterday's Ink Quest post. 'Could do better', it said, 'and here's how'.

In my dream, the details of which are still a little vague, I was working on the entry about pen badges, but when I got to the part about how compelling everyone to wear brooches signalling their preferred writing instruments would not work, I came up with a miraculous solution: panoptinkism.

Panopticism, as many of you probably already know, dear readers, was made famous by Michel Foucault, who, in a chapter of Surveiller et punir (a book known as Discipline and Punish in English), carefully scrutinized the implications of the panopticon, a prison designed (but not actually built) by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. This startling construction consisted of a central tower, in which the prison guards would be housed, and a surrounding circle of cells, each of which ran the entire width of the ring and thus could have windows on both the inner and outer walls. (I realize that I'm not describing this very well, so you might wish to consult the account given here. Alternatively, just picture a ring doughnut with a matchstick standing up in the middle. The doughnut is the cells, and the matchstick contains the guards.)

Bentham's structure -- and this is something discussed at length by Foucault -- ensured that the prisoners were visible at all times and, crucially, that the guards remained unseen. If you were unlucky enough to find yourself in a light-drenched cell, you would never know if you were being watched at any given moment (or even, more strikingly, if the tower contained an observer). Panopticism, Foucault argued, changes the way that those subjected to its gaze behave: because people never know for certain if they're being watched, but because it's being watched is always a possibility, they act as if they're always under surveillance. Discipline has become internalized; the human body, once mutilated by chains and guillotines, is now made docile by nothing more than the threat of vision. (For a fascinating account of how modern Los Angeles operates along precisely these lines, incidentally, see Mike Davis' City of Quartz.)

But what does all of this have to do with ink and badges in the shape of fountain pens? Well, dear readers, you will recall that my previous post ultimately rejected the wearing of pen-shaped badges because of the potentially sociable outcome: if I come out as an inkthusiast and wear my allegiance on my lapel, there's always the risk that strangers with similar interests will approach me and strike up conversation. But perhaps my inkconscious mind, by dreaming of Bentham's panopticon, has come up with a clever solution: panoptinkism.

In short, I'm locking myself in the tower at the centre of the panoptinkon. Everyone else will be required to wear badges identifying their choice of writing instrument, and I'll be able to scrutinize these as I move around the world, but I will wear nothing on my lapel. I will, in other words, be invisible, anonymous, immune to vision. As Foucault puts it, 'in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen'. And if I can't be seen, no one can attempt to draw me into the netherworld of social inkteraction, but I will be at liberty to pass harsh judgement on those around me. For me, it's a case of inkvisibility; for everyone else, it's a matter of ink-visibility and 'cell: la vie'.

Inks possibly in use in the tower today (how would you ever know for certain?): Noodler's Stockholm Indigo; Noodler's La Reine Mauve; Omas Blue.

The Pen Badge of Courage

Brooch: the subject.

I've been reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland this week, dear readers, and I have to say that I'm a little disappointed. When the novel was published last year, it was widely praised as the first truly great post-9/11 American novel (even though the author is actually Irish); some even went so far as to say that it gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money. I'm not so sure. Yes, there are some delightfully elegant moments, but there are also points where the prose creaks a little, and some of the 'Look, this is a metaphor!' and 'Isn't the Chelsea Hotel a zany place?!' sections caused me to wrinkle my nose in deep disapproval.

When I'd finished the book, I casually flicked through the interviews with the author that are included at the end of the British paperback edition. And it was here that I spotted something which might explain why, for me, the book is uneven. O'Neill is asked at one point if he writes with a pen or a computer. 'Laptop', he simply replies.

If I'd known this beforehand, I would perhaps not have bothered with the novel, for it seems to me that truly graceful, perfectly polished prose can only be produced by a pen (by which I mean a fountain pen, of course). To type straight onto a screen is to miss a crucial inky part of the process of composition -- if you haven't wrestled with the ink, you haven't written -- and to type straight onto the screen of a laptop is as bad as it gets. I have, quite simply, never understood the appeal of these ever-shrinking portable machines, which should, I think, in the light of Netherland's weaknesses, be confined to the smouldering fires of the nether regions. If you want a computer, at least have the decency to commit to it by clearing space for a desktop machine. Laptops, for me, say 'I want a computer, but I want it to be so small and so flat that I don't have to think about it'. (As much as I Iove Apple computers, I find the Macbook Air beyond comprehension. Why would I spend over £1200 on something that's essentially immaterial? If I want a slim box of air, I'll go to the garage and attach an empty pizza carton to the tyre hose, thank you very much. How long will it be before computer manufacturers launch a laptop that's actually measured in minus centimetres? Yeah, this one's 50000 gig and it's actually negative in width. Can you have a look at one? No, I'm afraid you can't: you'd need to be in the fifth dimension to get a glimpse of this baby.)

As I looked at the moody photograph of Joseph O'Neill inside the back cover of Netherland, I found myself wishing that he'd been wearing something clearly to identify him as a 'writer' who 'writes' on a laptop. A badge, maybe. Perhaps, I thought, it could simply take the form of a little picture of a portable computer. And whenever I then saw I picture of an author with an image of a laptop pinned to his or her lapel, I would know that I could simply discard his or her work.

It was at around this time that I happened to receive a message from a fellow member of the Fountain Pen Network, in which the existence of a company called Wm Spear Design was brought to my attention. If you click here or here, dear readers, you will see that this firm produces, among other things, small brooches/badges/pins in the shape of fountain pens. Perhaps, I then began to think, every member of the human race should be forced to wear a badge to identify his or her writing instrument of choice. Yes, I know what you're thinking: we've been here before with pink and yellow triangles, and look where that ended. But bear with me for a moment: I'm not proposing to exterminate or oppress those wearing the 'wrong' badges; I simply want to know who writes with what. I want ink to be out in the open. (Well, okay, perhaps I would turn a blind eye to the persecution of anyone caught wearing a ballpoint badge. If you're stupid enough to own up in public to being a fan of the biro, you deserve everything you get.)

But, as usual, my magnificent plans soon came crashing down around me. As I was on the verge of ordering a brooch in the shape of a fountain pen from Wm Spear Design, I realized that wearing such an item in public could possibly draw other inkthusiasts towards me. They might, I thought, even try to strike up friendly conversation. As I have no desire to talk to people, as I spend my life trying to get through the day without having to engage in idle chit-chat, a badge in the shape of a fountain pen and with such potentially social properties could be disastrous. (I'm already a bit anxious about attending the forthcoming South-West Pen Show in Bristol next month, and I was more than a little alarmed to see that members of the Fountain Pen Network are being invited to wear -- yes, you guessed it -- badges in order to 'encourage plenty of socialising'. I think that I'm going to be attending the event with honorary Penquod crew member Eileen, so perhaps I can use her as a shield or get Grover, her delightful West Highland Terrier, to attack anyone who comes near us.)

Having broached the subject, then, I fear that brooches are not the way forward. My lapel will remain without label. I will not, after all, be spending my pin-money on pins.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Stockholm Indigo; Noodler's La Reine Mauve. (These two colours have just arrived from Seattle, courtesy of honorary Penquod crew member Anna. They're both very pleasant and well-behaved inks: the Indigo is a sensible and permanent blue, while the Reine Mauve is a striking purple that flows very freely.)

1911

Eee! Oh! Eleven.

1911 is the number of the day, dear readers. While lying in bed listening to the radio in the wee small hours (yes, Baby Ink is still unwell), I discovered that the online version of the 1911 census for England and Wales has just been launched. With a few clicks and for a few pounds, people are now able to consult digitized versions of the original handwritten census returns completed by their ancestors. Some hours later, excited about the possibility of seeing the kind of ink used by my relatives nearly a century ago, I decided to search the census for entries relating to my parents' parents, who would have been young children at the time. (My maternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather were both born in 1906, for instance.) I have a somewhat unusual surname -- its strange spelling is rumoured to be the work of an eccentric relative who, in the dim and distant past, woke up one morning and decided to add an extra letter to the family name -- so I felt sure that it would take just seconds to track down ancestors on my father's side.

I was wrong. Very wrong, in fact, for I could find no reference whatever in the census to anyone with my surname or my maternal grandmother's maiden name. At first, I felt liberated: I have often longed to be invisible and hailed by no culture, and it seemed to me for a few minutes that having no recorded ancestors is a good first step on the road towards disappearance. (I have already done future relatives of mine a favour by refusing to register my American marriage with the British authorities. 'It's optional', I was told by someone at the Home Office. 'If you choose to record it over here, people tracing family trees in years to come will be able to track you down more easily. Most people opt to register overseas marriages for this very reason.' I opted not to. For that very reason.)

But then I became suspicious. Does the daily persecution that I suffer at the hands of the modern world have roots stretching back to the early years of the twentieth century? Were my grandparents, although mere children, deliberately excluded from the 1911 census? Did the state decide that they simply were not worth counting?

TELEGRAM
From: Census processing office, London
To: Census HQ, deep bunker 5
Subject: Undesirables
Date: 16 September 1911

Have received submissions from two families who will eventually unite and produce the author of Ink Quest STOP Spelling of one family's name of possibly lunatic origin STOP This office believes that the nation would be wise not to acknowledge the existence of either dynasty STOP Please confirm that census can be 'sexed down' accordingly STOP

Intrigued, I consulted the 'Why can't I find my ancestor?' section of the census website, where I read the following:

Because the documents transcribed were handwritten by each individual head of household there is a wide variety in the quality and condition of the writing. There are inevitably some errors in the transcription of the census, which result in spelling errors, although the 1911 census has exceeded the accuracy target of 98.5 per cent. If you see an error in the transcription you can report it via the ‘report error’ button on the transcript page.

Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan probably has a strong sense of déja vu at this point, for he recently found himself battling against the Ellis Island record office over an incorrect transcription of his family name on the document that (if I remember correctly) recorded the arrival of his father in the United States from Italy. But at least Stefan could find an incorrect record; my ancestors appear simply not to have existed.

I wonder if ink is somehow to blame. As I believe I have noted in previous posts, I have terrible handwriting. I can read it (well, most of the time), but others regularly find it utterly impossible to decipher. (I think that the secretaries where I work rank my scrawl as the second worst in the department; a distinguished professor with a magnificently impenetrable hand wears the crown of crowns, but I am quietly counting the days until he retires.) Perhaps I have simply inkherited the inkability to be legible from my inkvisible ancestors. Perhaps the head of each household from which I am descended was so sloppy, so cavalier with the ink that the census returns were impossible to decipher. Perhaps, ink other words, I am descended from a long (and wonky) line of scrawlers.

I fear that I will never know. I have tried inputting variant spellings and 'wildcards', but the census website has revealed nothing. With this in mind, I have been writing today with my suitably named Sailor 1911 fountain pen. Its extremely fine Japanese nib forces me to form my letters carefully, precisely, and -- dare I say it? -- almost legibly. (Give me a broad Music nib, on the other hand, and, to quote Seinfeld's Kramer, 'There's nothing holding me in place. I'm flipping, I'm flopping...') The inkvisibles are rising up. I am one who -- oh! -- shuns '11. We will be counted from now on. You will know us by our names. (Oh, wait...) You may not be able to see us, but you will be able to sense us.

Ink in precise use today: Noodler's Walnut.

Inkheart

I am the real Inkheart.

I have received two emails this week on the subject of Inkheart, the new Hollywood blockbuster about a man who has the ability to make characters in books come to life. In the first, my colleague Daphne asked if I have been to see the movie. (I haven't.) In the second, a fellow member of the Fountain Pen Network -- let's call him Ike, shall we, dear readers? -- remarked that he saw the title of the film and assumed that it was the story of my life.

It isn't, of course -- for that, see seasons 1-6 of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- but I have decided to make the title my own, for it seems that the Inkheart currently playing at a multiplex near you has very little to do with ink. I, by way of contrast, have a heart that endlessly draws me to ink, sometimes without my even being aware of it.

I will give you an example, dear readers. Baby Ink has been ill again this week, so has been at home with me for the last couple of days. He seemed to be feeling a little better yesterday afternoon, so I took him out for a short walk. Not long after he'd tried to pick my pocket (he'd been fascinated with the way that money came out of the ATM, and I then caught him, while I was holding him in my arms as we waited to cross the road, slipping his little hand inside my coat and towards my wallet), we called into a newsagent to buy a paper. It was at this point that my inkheart unconsciously swung into action, because, for no particular reason, I lowered him down to the floor once we were inside the shop. He ran straight to the children's magazine section and grabbed a copy of the publication sold to further the rule of Peppa Pig, one of his favourite cartoons. I tried to reason with him -- 'Look, let's ask them to order Pen World for you instead' -- but he won the battle, and 'Peppa's Official Magazine!' was carried triumphantly out of the shop in his tiny hand.

When we got home a few minutes later, he urged me to open the plastic packet on the front of the magazine. (I make it sound as if he put in a polite written request; he simply pointed and shouted 'There! There!' until I obliged.) I hadn't paid any attention to the 'FREE GIFT!' attached to Peppa until this point, and I suddenly realized that I had both made a terrible mistake and unwittingly struck ink. I had made a mistake because the toy was made up of pieces far too small for a child of less than two years of age. (Indeed, when I read the extremely small print at the bottom of the cover -- and I'll come back to this small print in a moment -- I saw that three is the recommended minimum age.) But I had simultaneously struck ink because the toy inside the plastic wrapper was a tiny rubber stamp -- of Peppa, naturally -- and ink pad.

I was, therefore, faced with a terrible dilemma:

- Protect son by refusing to allow him to play with the toy, but risk turning him into an ink-phobic ballpoint user later in life

OR

- Endanger son's life by sitting and reading the newspaper while he discovers the pleasures of ink ... but hovers on the verge of choking to death on tiny plastic objects.

In the end, I deconstructed the binary opposition (I knew that all those years of reading the work of Jacques Derrida would come in handy one day) by letting him handle the objects under strict supervision, and then pulling that old parents' classic: the distraction manoeuvre. Yes, dear readers, I waited for him to turn away from the stamp and ink pad for a moment, and I then said 'Oh, look!' in an excited tone and thrust a different toy into his hands. He immediately forgot all about the hazardous materials, which were quickly whisked to a shelf far beyond his reach.

My ink-drawn heart is clearly a force to be reckoned with. No matter how hard I consciously try to be a good parent, it exerts a dangerous, unconscious inkfluence upon me. I had no conscious reason for placing Baby Ink on his feet in front of the Peppa Pig magazine, with its forbidden inky treat. And I really should have paid attention to what I was buying for my son, but some mysterious force blinded me to the 'FREE GIFT!' on the cover of the magazine. My inkheart made me do it. (That's what I'm telling Social Services, anyway.)

Later that night, I found myself casually reading the small print on the cover of the publication. Perhaps it was just the size of the typeface, I told myself, that made me overlook the words 'POTENTIAL CHOKING HAZARD'. But perhaps not. I realized that my inkheart was definitely to blame when I also spotted the sentence 'INK MAY STAIN' in the printed warning. (I've ranted in previous posts about how modern culture's obsession with risk management leads to such absurdities, so I won't complain again here. Actually, I will. Ink may stain, you say? Of course ink may stain. That's why they call it ink. [With apologies to Danny De Vito's character in David Mamet's Heist.] Should we also label taps with 'Water may wet' and radiators with 'Heat may heat'?)

Freud tells us that our conscious minds often filter out information that's there before our very eyes. (This is, if I remember correctly, how he explains the phenomenon of déja vu.) I didn't consciously see the reference to ink on the cover of the magazine in front of which I placed Baby Ink, but my inkheart (or my inkconscious, to give things a more Freudian gloss) evidently did. And it led me unknowingly to act out a situation in which potentially fatal ink was thrust into the hands of my offsprink.

I clearly cannot be trusted. I am, I can now see, a man driven solely by ink, by an inkheart. I am, if I may be forgiven a heart-to-heart moment, doomed to walk around with my heart in my mouth, always at risk of risk. Who knows what life-threatening act I will next be driven to by ink? I am Inkheart, but I can, for that very reason, never be in heart.

Ink being pumped around my body today: Rohrer and Klingner Sepia.

Crate Expectations

Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.

Readers wearily familiar with the misanthropic and anti-social ways of Ink Quest will probably not be surprised to learn that I detest New Year's Eve. While raucous hordes stumbled past my house in search of midnight, setting off fireworks that terrified my cats and roused Baby Ink from his slumber, I sat inside in my best hair shirt, reading Tolstoy's Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?, nibbling stale bread, and stubbornly ignoring the arrival of another year. (Actually, there was little stubborn about it: I, like many parents of toddlers, no doubt, was fast asleep long before the chimes sounded.)

Even more annoying than the festivities, perhaps, is the inane ritual of making a set of resolutions for the coming year. Why do people feel the need to pretend to be virtuous just because December has grumbled into January? I resolutely resist resolutions! I was, then, pleased to learn this morning that Mind, one of Britain's mental-health charities (the hyphen is crucial there, I feel), has declared that vowing to turn over a new leaf on 1 January can actually be damaging to one's health. Here is how the BBC News website explains things:

Mind chief executive Paul Farmer said focussing on problems or insecurities can lead to feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem and even mild depression. "We chastise ourselves for our perceived shortcomings and set unrealistic goals to change our behaviour, so it's not surprising that when we fail to keep resolutions, we end up feeling worse than when we started," he said. "In 2009, instead of making a New Year's resolution, think positively about the year to come and what you can achieve."

Feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem and even mild depression are perfectly normal for me, and I wouldn't want it any other way. As George Costanza once put it, 'I feel like my old self again: neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate, completely insecure. It's a pleasure!' Positive thinking is positively alien to my being, and I find myself driven to extreme levels of rage ('Serenity now!') by people who insist on seeing hope in everything. Accent the negative and eliminate the positive, people. (But just don't tell me that it's your New Year's resolution to be more pessimistic.)

While I applaud Mind's decision to attack the institution of resolutions, I will not, therefore, be taking Paul Farmer's advice and thinking positively about 2009. The name of our new year ends with a 'nein', after all, liebe Leser, so we were unavoidably plunged into the realm of the negative at the stroke of midnight on 31 December. (Here comes two thousand and ... NEIN!) By complete coincidence, however, I have started the year by reorganizing my inks. As I sit typing these words, the bottles, vials, and cartridges sit happily in a new wooden box behind me. I have reached out and tapped it with my knuckle on several occasions, just to enjoy the timbre of the timber.

The move from the old box was long overdue. I can't remember exactly when I purchased it, but it must have been in the very early days of the Penquod's quest for the perfect ink, as the container couldn't really hold that many bottles. It had reached the point, in fact, where ink was stacked upon ink ... and sometimes stacked upon ink stacked upon ink. This meant that I very often forgot all about certain colours in my collection. It was not until I emptied the old box while the recent loft conversion was underway, for instance, that I remembered my ownership of Diamine Washable Blue. Then, to my amazement, I stumbled across a vial of Campo Marzio Roma Sepia sent to me by honorary Penquod member Anna some time ago. I remember being delighted to receive this somewhat rare brown, but it must have slipped to the bottom of the ink box and, in doing so, slipped from my memory. It is now at the top of the pile and ready to find its way into the next available pen.

Some would probably see these oversights as proof that I own too much ink; I, however, simply decided that it was time to expand my storage facilities, and so I recently purchased a small wooden crate (pictured above) from my local branch of Ikea. All of the inks have been transferred with great care to the new container, and I now feel ready to enter 2009 with a better sense of what I actually own. For once I can lift the lid and see at a glance my entire collection of ink. This will be the year in which I forget not a single colour, in which I rotate my shades in a more inklusive manner. Thanks to the new ink box, I have crate expectations for the coming twelve months. Call it case of boxing clever.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Standard Brown; Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black.

Notes from the Underground

There's treasure 'neath them there floorboards.

But before I tell you about that, dear readers, I must apologize for not appearing on my balcony on Tuesday to deliver the annual Ink Quest Festivus address. (I know that many of you are already familiar with the principles of Festivus, the festival 'for the rest of us' who do not celebrate Christmas, but those to whom the word currently means nothing may wish to click here to find out more.) My speech was written in my latest ink (about which I will have more to say below) and my pocket square had been puffed to perfection, but I was simply too ill to get out of bed. What I had thought to be the virus initially enjoyed by Baby Ink was actually a case of the hideous flu bug that's currently sweeping the nation. And so it came to pass that Festivus, well, came to pass, and I could do nothing but look on deliriously from beneath my duvet. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day drifted by in a similar manner, and it is only now that I feel well enough to take to the balcony of the Penquod and address the gathered masses. Festivus may now be over for 2008, but it is none the less crucial that I deliver my message -- urbink et orbink -- for saving humankind from the ballpoint pen is just as important as saving the rainforests.

The last time I had a case of flu as bad as this was in early 1992. I was an impoverished undergraduate at the time, and I was living in a tiny flat whose bare breeze-blocked walls lent it the feel of a Warsaw prison cell. I remember the onset of the illness with strange clarity: I was several pages into Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground when I suddenly felt faint. I lay down on my bed, fell fast asleep, and awoke in the middle of the night drenched in cold sweat. I spent the next few days beneath a blanket, shivering, hallucinating, and occasionally accepting a bowl of soup. When I finally recovered, I found that the mere sight of Dostoevsky's book made me feel ill. It was about fifteen years before I could complete the tale.

I still believe that Notes from the Underground made me unwell in 1992. And I think I know precisely what was to blame for my recent collapse: too much DIY.

Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that the last few months have seen Ink Towers undergo a loft conversion. The company responsible for the construction was quick and efficient, but it's taken us a long time to decorate and return the house to a state of normality. One of the biggest headaches was moving everything out of my old study so that the carpet could be taken up and the floorboards painted. I thought that this would be a simple task, but all sorts of mysteries emerged as soon as the carpet was lifted. In short, it seems to me that the person who renovated Ink Towers shortly before we bought it replaced around half of the original (1901) floorboards in the room. But for some reason, he chose not to nail down many of the new planks; in some cases, the replacement boards didn't even fit together properly. While the thick carpet was in place, these 'nuances' didn't really show up -- I always simply assumed that the creaking was a period feature that would add value to the property -- but they became all too apparent once the boards were bared.

Perhaps it was because I'd recently seen professional carpenters at work; perhaps it was because I'd made so many trips to the local DIY shop for paint (and, of course, protective gloves and goggles) in the last few weeks. We will never know for sure why what happened next happened next, dear readers, but I can assure you that it really did happen: I, the man who refuses to believe that there is any difference between a screw and a nail, armed myself with a hammer and set about securing the loose boards. (This was, I should perhaps add, after I'd spent about five minutes weighing up the feasibility of using duct tape -- and then slapping on an extra coat of paint to hide it.) So rare was this event that I called the Inkette to act as witness. 'Look!', I cried. 'I'm hammering. Real nails. An actual hammer. Not a can of beans, I tell you. An actual hammer. From a DIY shop. Where men go.'

There was, however, one board which refused to be nailed down. This, I quickly realized, was because it was too big for its slot. I also quickly realized that this meant I would need to remove the plank, cut a piece from the end, and reinsert it. Throwing all remaining caution to the wind, I prepared my saw and made ready to hoist the wood.

Thanks to Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, I always assume that floorboards have something hidden beneath them. (Isn't that the only reason that builders, when constructing a house, leave a gap between the ceiling of one level and the floor of the next? There's no practical explanation, surely; it can only be about creating a sense of mystery.) I fully expected, then, to find gold coins, a bloodied knife, a skull, or perhaps a cryptic note beneath the floorboards of Ink Towers. Sadly, all I discovered were pipes for the central heating (which I'd somehow managed to miss with my recklessly hammered nails). Disappointed, I decided to leave my own treasure beneath the plank for future residents of the house.

I noted in a recent entry how the loft conversion unearthed a ghostly signature beneath layers of wallpaper, and I have also mentioned in passing that I am now the proud owner of a bottle of Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black ink. This beautiful dark blue was designed to stand the test of time: it is immune to water and other liquids, and any attempt to erase the ink with bleach turns it into a tell-tale teal. With the spectral signature of G. Fitzgerald and my new ink in mind, I took a break from hammering nails and wrote a very brief note on a small piece of paper. I will not reveal precisely what I inscribed -- that is for other eyes only -- but I will say that I identified myself by name, gave the address of this blog, and ended by giving the date. I then folded the sheet, placed it beneath the floorboards, used my saw to trim the plank, and hammered home the nails.

I have no idea who will be the recipient of my note. Perhaps no one will ever find it. Perhaps it will be discovered at a date when I am no longer alive, when all that remains are my remains and my assorted inky marks. Perhaps it will be read at a point in the future when the internet no longer exists, when 'blog' is marked 'Obs.' in dictionaries (if they still exist).

The possibility that Ink Quest will not survive in an archive is a distinct one, of course. Who on earth (or on some other planet) would want to preserve this? And as I consider the transience of this blog, to which I have given over three years of my life, I can't help feeling that the ink-free nature of blogging is a problem. Ink Quest, for all its commitment to the materiality of writing, is wholly immaterial (and not in the sense intended by the Inkette). Yes, I usually write each entry by hand before typing it up, but I don't keep the scribbled sheets. This is all that there is. Zeros and ones. Pulses. Waves and radiation.

Perhaps, if I may hold the floor for just a few more moments, I should start depositing a handwritten copy of each entry beneath the floorboards of Ink Towers. That way, if the internet should disappear one day, I will still have my notes, my notes from the underground. (I'm a sick man ... I'm a malicious man. An unattractive man, I am ... But my archiving is impeccable. Flawless, you might say.) My paper trail has gone by the board for long enough; it is time for such carelessness to walk the plank. The plans for the survival of Ink Quest have been duly hammered out. I think that ought to nail it.

Inks in use today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black.

Je Reviens

The Penquod probably ought to change its name to Je Reviens, in honour of the boat owned by Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, dear readers, for I have spent a fair amount of time recently apologizing for returning after long silences. The latest hitch has come in the form of Baby Ink's falling ill with some kind of chest virus, which he has thoughtfully passed on to me. On top of that, Ink Towers is stil in a state of utter disarray following the recent loft conversion: while the construction work and the decorating are now finished, everything needs to be returned to the place from which it was moved to make way for the builders. The simplest journey from one side of the bedroom to the other, for instance, currently involves a complicated slalom through piles of books.

I hope, then, to return with my annual Festivus address on Tuesday, and I can promise a fascinating tale of a magnificent new ink and treasure hidden beneath the floorboards of my house. While you are hovering on the edge of your seats, dear readers, I will leave you with the cartoon posted above, which I offer for all inkthusiasts who are being driven insane by the approach of Christmas. It's from the new Christmas book by the makers of the gloriously misanthropic and irreverent Modern Toss, and it made me laugh out loud yesterday afternoon. Readers who dislike 'potty-mouthed language' are advised to hide their sensitive eyes behind a mince pie.

Je reviendrai...

Ink in use today: Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black (about which I will have more to say in the Festivus address).

Hand, Ink, Glove

Finally, the gloves are off.

Ink Quest's recent silence, dear readers, has two principal sources. First, I have had a couple of urgent work-related deadlines, so every day has been spent racing manically towards the completion of projects that will make no difference whatever to the way of the world. Second, now that the Ink Towers loft conversion has been completed, the Inkette and I have, as soon as Baby Ink has gone to bed, been filling each evening with the delicate aroma of paint fumes. As the splattering is now coming to an end, I finally have time to sit down and turn my thoughts to ink.

Actually, ink has been on my mind while I've been Pollocking with paint brushes and rollers. For the first few evenings of glossing, I foolishly took up the tin of paint without covering my hands in any way. By the end of each session, my delicate fingers and palms were covered in thick gloss paint, which I could only remove with white spirit. It didn't take long for this brutal routine to cause havoc: after a couple of days, my skin had reacted to the harsh chemical, and I began to worry that my sore hands would never again be able to hold a fountain pen.

Fading in and out of consciousness, I dragged my savaged frame to the nearest DIY shop and asked for gloves to protect my hands while painting. The burly assistant pointed me towards the appropriate shelf (and I'm sure that he muttered 'You'll find the lavender posies in the florist further down the street' as soon as my back was turned). There, for less than £2.00, I found a packet of five pairs of surgical-style gloves. I limped to the counter, handed over my money, and somehow made it home without lapsing into a coma.

I have to hand it to them: these gloves saved my life. I was a bit worried at first about the 'One size fits all' declaration on the packet, but it turned out that they fitted me like a glove. More importantly, they protected my skin perfectly from the gloss paint: at the end of each evening, I would peel them off and admire my clean -- if slightly wrinkled -- hands. After several days of rubberized bliss, I actually became quite fond of the objects. I have even, for posterity, taken a photograph of myself wearing one, and I have proudly displayed the picture at the top of this post. I suspect that I could make a small fortune in the world of hand modelling. George Costanza, the fictional character to whom I most relate, very nearly made it big in the business, after all. 'This is a one-in-a-million hand!', he says to Jerry, in an episode entitled 'The Puffy Shirt', shortly after his hands have been spotted by a talent scout. 'Well', comes the reply, 'that's what comes from avoiding manual labour your whole life'.

I think that I've enjoyed wearing these rubber contraptions because, in short, I like wearing gloves. I hate the summer, and I hate hot weather; I spend July and August longing for the arrival of November, when I can finally start wearing my winter coat, my thick scarf, and, above all, my gloves again. Human hands simply shouldn't be on show, I feel. Gloves should be as compulsory as socks. (Please don't point out that plenty of people walk around without socks. I know that they do, and it should be illegal, no matter how high the temperature. I have no desire to sit in a café or on a train and have to put up with the sight of uncovered feet. They're feet, people! Listen to the word: f-f-f-e-e-e-e-t. It's the sound of a garment of some kind being pulled over the appendage. Onomatopedia, I suppose you could call it.)

Ink fact, it seems to me that a cultural history of gloves needs to be written. They crop up in all sorts of memorable moments, after all. Think of Van Morrison's soaring 'Madame George', where 'Hey, love, you forgot your glove' slides into one of the greatest vocal flourishes ever recorded: 'And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love'. (I can't find an online version of the original recording from Astral Weeks, but curious readers can consult a recent live version here, where the line in question is stretched out even further, just after the 4:05 mark.) Think of Marlon Brando picking up and then -- gasp -- donning the glove dropped by Eva Marie Saint at roughly 6:15 in the following clip from On the Waterfront.



Think of the magnificent, elegiac descriptions of the glove trade in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. Think of the scene in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence where Newland unbuttons Ellen's glove. (Scorsese films this beautifully, but YouTube appears not to have the relevant clip.) Think of the tell-tale glove in Hitchcock's Blackmail.

And think, dear readers, of how gloves might help to overthrow the vile rule of the ballpoint pen and return fountain pens to their rightful place in everyone's hands. One of the reasons that many people give when asked why they don't use real ink and a fountain pen is that such things are 'messy'. 'I don't want to get my hands covered in ink' is a sentence that I've heard dozens of times, and I have reported in previous posts how my colleague and honorary Penquod crew member Daphne had to be coaxed back to the world of fountain pens after an unfortunate inkident in her teenage years left her with purple-tinted fingers.

The solution, then, is simple: gloves. As a pure misanthrope, I am never going to love people, but perhaps I can glove people. Yes, dear readers, am I going to take up the glove of gloving the world. (My local DIY shop already has a good deal going, but perhaps I can get a better price for a bulk purchase. 'How many packets would you like, sir? 'Well, let's see ... what's 6.7 billion divided by five?') If everyone were to wear gloves all of the time, there would be no need to worry about getting inky fingers, so all anxieties about using fountain pens should inkstantly disappear. Their hands protected, former ballpoint users would rush hand-over-fist to get their mitts on a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. The future rule of real ink is in hand, in my hands. All hands to the deck of the Penquod, please: we have hands to deck. Gloves will be my mitt-zvah.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.
Ink on its way to to me as I write: Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black.

The Life of G. Fitzgerald

Ever since I saw the famous graffiti scene in Monty Python's The Life of Brian many years ago, I have paid very close attention to scribbles left upon walls. The details count.



I have no interest in creating graffiti of my own; I'm content to look at the handiwork of others. This is probably because fountain pens are not usually the weapon of choice for today's aerosol-wielding graffiti artists. (Wouldn't it be fun, though, to set up an urban posse called The Nib Crew? Under cover of darkness, we would climb over razor-wire -- minding our silk pocket squares as we went -- to leave inky art upon the sides of trains. At the sight of the police, we would quickly apply blotting paper to the carriages, screw the caps back onto our fountain pens, and disappear into the night.)

But were things once different? Was it once normal practice to use a fountain pen when scribbling on a wall? I ask because the Ink Towers loft conversion has revealed something rather intriguing. Now that the work is -- a few small tasks aside -- completed, I have been taking stock of what needs to be done in terms of painting. Where the workmen knocked a hole in the bedroom wall (see the entry of 6 November for graphic photographic evidence), they had to strip back some of the existing wallpaper. As I was adding this bare patch of wall to my list of things to do yesterday evening, I spotted something scribbled upon the original plasterwork, preserved beneath a layer of a varnish-like substance. A closer inspection revealed it to be a signature: G. Fitzgerald.

I have tried to capture the writing in the picture displayed above, but it is remarkably difficult to photograph. You can probably just about make out the letters and the style of the handwriting, which speaks instantly of earlier days. The way that the letters are formed reminds me very much of my grandmother's script, in fact. She was born in 1906, and Ink Towers popped into the world five years before that, so I have spent the day wondering if G. Fitzgerald played a part in the early years of my house.

Was he one of the builders or first plasterers? (I say 'he' because I doubt very much that the construction industry in South Wales had any female members in 1901. I doubt very much, actually, that it has any in 2008.) Or was G. Fitzgerald the first owner, or one of the first owners, of the building now in my possession? What does -- or did, I suppose -- the 'G.' stand for? Was the person who made the mark upon the wall male or female? Old or young?

I cannot answer those questions at present, in the present. I could, in time, check through the archived censuses to see if a G. Fitzgerald ever lived at my address. I could, in case my dating is out by several decades, ask my neighbour, who has lived in her house since something like 1952, if she can remember a Mr or Mrs Fitzgerald ever occupying Ink Towers. I could, finally, ring the company that has been working on the loft for the last few weeks to check if its employees have been using their tea breaks to create an elaborate graffiti hoax. ('He seems to like fountain pens, boys. And he sits downstairs writing on smooth paper and rehearsing pocket square techniques while we're up here working our fingers to the bone. Let's mess with his mind.')

There is, however, one thing of which I am fairly sure: it looks very much as if G. Fitzgerald signed his or her name with a fountain pen. I'd have to strip off the varnish and undertake a series of complicated chemical tests to be certain, of course, but the lines seem too broad and bold to have been created by a pencil. Ink Towers was perhaps Ink Towers long before I took up residence here, in other words. Perhaps I was drawn here by a mysterious force. Maninkfest destiny. If you ink it, they will come.

The discovery of the signature has led me once again to consider the relationship between writing and death. As I have noted here on many previous occasions, the written word has a distinct advantage over its live, spoken counterpart: it can outlast the one who forms it. As soon as I shape words with a pen, those written marks take on a life of their own that in no way relies upon mine. They can carry on signifying without me, without my being in the world.

The archaic style of G. Fitzgerald's handwriting leads me to believe that he or she is no longer alive. I may be wrong, of course, but those elegant letters simply don't conjure up the modern world when I gaze upon them. Was he or she aware at the moment of inscription that a future occupant of his or her house -- perhaps someone yet to be born -- would one day study the scribble and wonder? Wasn't that eventuality assumed as soon as the pen touched the wall, in fact? Kilroy was here. Was here. Is no longer. Will not be again.

There is a ghostly twist to this thrilling tale, dear readers. The reason that the signature was so difficult to photograph is that the new staircase to the converted loft hangs over the wall where G. Fitzgerald left his or her mark. The shadow of the steps falls heavily over the point where pen once touched wall. And hidden away beneath wood and plasterboard are the undersides of those steps, the core of the structure, as it were. Where each horizontal plank touches the newel (a technical term that I learnt last week), someone in the workshop where the staircase was made to order has written my surname in bold black ink, presumably to make sure that all of the pieces ended up in the right place. Because the belly of the staircase has now been boxed in, this spiralling repetition of my name is hidden from sight. But perhaps one day, long after I have returned to nothingness, a future occupant of this house -- perhaps someone who has yet to be born -- will refurbish the property and strip back the staircase to the loft. He or she will then discover a repeated name, a series of marks left in ink, and might wonder for a moment about the owner of that name, the owner of the house, the owner then of nothing. Ink will eventually represent me, loftily take my place. The writing is on the wall.

Inks flaunting their immortality today: Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black; Mont Blanc Racing Green.

PS: American readers of Ink Quest should feel free to read out this cheery, life-affirming post as they gather around their dinner tables for the Thanksgivink feast today.

Djinnk

The following night, the readers of Ink Quest said to the captain of the Penquod, 'Please, master, if you are not sleepy, tell us the rest of the story of the skip and the ballpoint pen.' The captain replied, 'With the greatest pleasure'.

I realized this morning, dear readers, that I have not completed the tale of the skip and the ballpoint pen which I began in the entry of 13 November, where I described how I had deposited a biro in the skip outside Ink Towers, hoping that someone would take it and leave something thrilling in its place. Like Shahrazad, then, I will continue my 'strange and entertaining story'; my life depends upon it.

As the loft conversion is now almost finished, the skip was removed from the street yesterday morning. Before it was collected, I checked on the status of the ballpoint pen, and I was astonished to see that it had disappeared. It may simply have slipped into the depths of the rubbish, of course, but there is always the possibility that it caught the eye of a light-fingered passerby. With eager heart, I looked for a bottle of ink that had been left in exchange for the biro, but I could find nothing new apart from an empty Pot Noodle container, a few newspapers, and a lampshade.

Bitterly disappointed, I retired inside and carried on working at my desk while the carpenter and the electrician completed the last few items on their list. (All that remains to be done now is the fitting of a couple of vents to the roof; the wooden flooring will then be laid over the weekend.) Shortly after lunch, they packed up their tools and said their last goodbyes. Surrounded by silence for the first time in weeks, I crept upstairs to inspect the transformed space.

The first thing that caught my eye was not the craftsmanship, the light streaming in through the new Velux windows, or the now-dry chimney breast that I had varnished with wild abandon on Sunday evening; it was, rather, a ballpoint pen lying on the floor next to one of the cupboard doors. It was covered in a strange dust. A close inspection -- I didn't touch it, of course -- revealed that it had not originated from within Ink Towers. A photograph of this strange, monstrous object is displayed above, dear readers.

While the pen looked nothing like the one that I had left in the skip, it remained a member of the hideous ballpoint family, and I suddenly felt as if I were caught up in magical tale reminiscent of something found in The Arabian Nights. I threw away a biro, only to find a replacement mysteriously appear some days later. Has the Penquod fallen under the spell of an ink-loathing djinn? Am I being punished by an evil spirit for using this blog to denounce ballpoint pens with such vehemence and regularity? Will every Bic that I cast away return in another form to haunt and taunt me? Have all of my throwaway remarks about biros caused me now to be unable to throw away biros?

I have been too scared to return to the loft since yesterday afternoon. Even the cats, who are normally curious to explore any new space or object, have chosen to remain on the first two levels of Ink Towers. I inkitially thought of gathering together the crew members of the Penquod for an exorcism, but then I remembered one of the most famous tales found in some versions of The Arabian Nights (but not, inkidentally, in the earliest fourteenth-century manuscript upon which Husain Haddawy bases his wonderful edition). As countless children learn at a very early age, when the mother of 'Ala Al-Din (or Aladdin) rubs the magic lamp that has come into her son's possession, a powerful genie appears and asks what is wished of it.

With this classic story in mind, I am about to creep up to the loft. In my hand I will hold an empty bottle of ink. As soon as I catch sight of the biro, I will unscrew the lid and gently rub the glass. If all goes according to plan, a djinn -- no, a djinnk -- will appear at this point and usher the pen into the bottle. I will then close the lid and walk the streets until I find a skip into which to throw the object.

But morning overtook the captain of the Penquod, and he lapsed into silence. Then his readers said, 'Captain, what an amazing and entertaining story!' The captain replied, 'What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night if the djinnk spares me and lets me live!'

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade; Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black.

Receipt

Are you receiving me?

While I was pampering myself with rich, decadent, Truefitt and Hill shaving cream this morning, I heard an item on the radio about how British shoppers will need to inspect their receipts carefully in coming weeks if, as is suspected, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announces today that VAT is to be cut from 17.5% to 15% in an attempt to stave off the recession. We will need, said the reporter, to check that we're not being overcharged.

Coincidentally, I found myself scrutinizing a receipt towards the end of last week, dear readers, thus proving yet again that I am streets ahead of received trends. The slip of paper in question is displayed above, with certain details (to which I will refer in time) obscured. Tax, however, was not taxing my mind.

I left for work on Thursday morning feeling decidedly underdressed. Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that I have recently developed an obsession with silk pocket squares; I now find that I am simply unable to wear a suit without a flourish flamboyantly flaming from my breast pocket. I faced a traumatic difficulty that day, however, for I was desperate to wear for the first time a tie that I had bought a few days earlier, but I suddenly realized that I had no pocket square to flaunt alongside it. The rule, I have learnt, is that the silk should not match the main colour of the tie, but should, rather, echo one of the background shades. As my new tie has small white spots, I realized that a white pocket square was required, and I decided to call into the centre of Cardiff to purchase such an object on my way to work.

As I stood on the platform and then sat on the train, I felt that a part of me was missing. My briefcase contained the habitual three fountain pens, each filled with a different shade of ink, so all was well in that respect, but my square-free pocket felt achingly empty. Devoid of square, I was even more of a square peg in a round hole than usual.

When I stepped off the train at Cardiff Central, I began to weigh up my options. Where, I asked myself, would be the place most likely to sell white silk pocket squares? Ruling out all of the hip and trendy clothing outlets, I set my sights on the least fashionable place in town: Calders. Here is a store so defiantly archaic that it has no website. Here is a store that has not changed a jot in as long as I can remember. (A quick Google search reveals photographic evidence that it stood on Churchill Way until at least the mid-1960s, but my memory, which goes back no further than the 1970s, knows nothing but the present Duke Street location.) Here is a store that sits stubbornly across the road from Cardiff Castle, mocking the battlements for their hollow modern stylings. Here is a store whose survival in the twenty-first century is something of a miracle.

I don't know how much longer Calders will last, for the ground floor was completely deserted when I walked through the doors on Thursday morning. I was, as a result, immediately approached by one of the shop's magnificently polite and helpful assistants, who showed me a selection of white silk pocket squares. I made my choice and handed over my debit card. It was it this point that one of the most gloriously anachronistic processes that I have seen in quite some time sprang (well, tortoised) into action.

Instead of taking my card over to the computerized device that I could see on one of the other counters, the assistant produced a old-fashioned receipt book and began to write on one of the slips. I watched in amazement as he noted the price and description of the item, then added my name to the top of the receipt, and even copied out the number and expiry date of my card in full. Only when this meticulous work was over did he walk slowly across to the machine, swipe my card, and ask me to enter my PIN. I was then given the two receipts and thanked for my custom.

In an age where speed and ruthless efficiency in the marketplace are valued, the Calders approach to receipts is refreshingly, defiantly slow and inefficient. Let me be perfectly clear: I mean this to be received as a glowing compliment. I love the fact that the shop continues to issue handwritten receipts in the era of quickly printed slips. I love, too, how it effectively invites its customers to choose which format they think is better; there's simply no need for two receipts, after all. (The assistant did seem slightly uncomfortable with the computerized device, so I think I know where his affections lie.)

I have just one complaint, and here, dear readers, is where ink finally makes its dawdling entrance. As you can see in the image of the handwritten receipt displayed above, the assistant completed the slip in ballpoint pen. While I have nothing but admiration for the shop's archaic system, and while I (unlike some of my chuckling colleagues) am very happy with my new pocket square, I was very disappointed to learn that this temple to tradition permits the use of the modern monster that is the biro. Why pollute a store that makes so few concessions to the post-war period with a recently invented writing instrument? Why not slow things down and roll back the wheel of history even further with fountain pens and inkwells upon the counters? Why not complete each receipt with a nib cut to imitate script from earlier times? Why not acknowledge a purchase with an ink that gives the impression of dusty antiquity? (Diamine Indigo would work rather well, I feel.)

My dictionary inkforms me that an archaic meaning of 'receipt' is 'recipe'. This seems fitting, as Calders has, in my opinion, just one ingredient out of place in its current recipe for retail. Almost everything is perfect: its clothing takes no account of developments in fashion since about 1962 (here be no leisurewear); its staff, unlike assistants in virtually every other shop in Britain, actually seem to know something about the stock; and, above all, it issues handwritten receipts. All that is missing is the real ink. I would email the store a link to this undoubtedly helpful post, but, as the business has no presence on the web, I doubt that it would be in a position to acknowledge receipt.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Nightshade; Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon.

Skipping

Who would have thought that a skip could be so much fun?

Users of real ink tend to hate moments when the pen skips, when the nib moves across the page but fails to leave an inky mark. A skip, that is to say, is usually something to avoid at all costs. But the ongoing loft conversion at Ink Towers has generated a skip that people seem unwilling and unable to avoid. I am referring, dear readers, to the large metal container -- the skip -- pictured above, into which the workmen have been throwing bits of old wood, insulation, piping, and so on. (When they're not eating biscuits and drinking tea, that is; they're currently devouring an entire packet of chocolate digestives every day, and I've found it easier simply to rewire my kettle so that it's constantly on.)

This humble skip has apparently skipped its way to the centre of the community, for people keep using it to dump their own unwanted goods (plant pots, a clothes horse, newspapers, and cushions, for instance; most of what you can see in the receptacle has nothing to do with my loft conversion). More bizarrely, several times every day I notice someone digging around in the rubbish to look for anything of value. A couple of nights ago, a delivery van from a local pizzeria stopped on two separate occasions, and the driver got out to fill the back of the van with bits of wood. He was in up to his elbows. I know that the firm does not have a wood-burning oven, so I have made a mental note never to order one of their pizzas again. Yesterday, meanwhile, a little old man knocked on the door and asked if he could load up on off-cuts for some of his pensioner friends who have real fires in their houses. 'It will save them a bit of money in this cold weather', he said. I told him to take what he wanted, but only realized later that I should also have directed him to the pizzeria. ('Just ask for a thin-crust Purloined Plank. Oh, and you might want to try a side order of Dubious Hygiene.')

Longtime readers of Ink Quest will know that I very easily become obsessed by inanimate objects (pens, shaving creams, silk pocket squares), so it will come as no surprise that I have developed an all-consuming fascination with the skip. Every time I step outside the house, I eagerly peek inside to see what has arrived and what has disappeared since my last inspection. And whenever there's the slightest noise in the street at night, I leap out of bed to see if it's the sound of the skip being raided or filled under cover of darkness.

It amuses me that I -- who spend my days doing everything that I can to avoid community, social interaction, and gatherings -- have, thanks to my skip, become the core of the local community. If it's not happening in or around my skip, it's simply not happening. I, skipper of the skip, am the magical figure around whom all life in [NAME OF TOWN DELETED TO PREVENT THE SKIP BECOMING A GLOBAL TOURIST ATTRACTION] revolves.

Beyond that, I find the social network and system of exchanges that have sprung up around this giant waste receptacle to be endlessly fascinating. Is the town filled with people who walk around looking for skips to raid or use? Are the contents of skips commonly accepted to be public property? Does the company that delivered the object to my house post addresses of newly deposited skips on a secret internet discussion forum? (The curious started to arrive not long after the skip itself, so there's clearly some kind of insider trading going on. You'd have to be a true skiptic to put it all down to coincidence.) Is there a formula to determine how long it will be before any dumped object is purloined by a passerby? Is there a word to describe the act of stealing something from a skip? (Skipping?)

But what does this have to do with ink? (I should have opened this post with a note about the impatient being able to skip straight to the seventh paragraph, I suppose.) A great deal, dear readers. Because my skip has essentially become a point of exchange -- someone dumps an item, and another person then comes along, takes it, and possibly leaves something else in its place -- I have rounded up an old ballpoint pen from the back of a drawer, and I have placed it as casually as possible on top of the rubbish. It rightly belongs there, of course, but my hope is that a biro-loving passerby will pick it up and simultaneously dump an unwanted fountain pen or a bottle of ink, which I will quickly rescue and welcome into the hold of the Penquod. (If you're reading this, have recognized my skip, and wish to replace my Bic with some ink, I'd quite like, dear Santa, some Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black. The Writing Desk is about to receive its first delivery of this intriguing colour, and I'm desperate to get my inky hands on a bottle.)

I'm hoping for a fruitful inkschange, in other words, and I'll be peering through the window every few minutes throughout the night to check the status of the snare. If I had a portable webcam, I'd set up a real-time 'Skip Watch' Skypecast. (If you're a regular reader of this blog about nothing, you'd find the footage captivating, I'm sure.) Better still, I should attach a cardiograph to my chest and broadcast the results as a live feed to Ink Quest. You'd know that the biro had been replaced by ink as soon as you saw the beat of my longing heart skip.

Inks in use today: Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon; Noodler's Eternal Blue.

Separation Inkxiety

Yesterday was a truly historic day. The world changed forever and will never be the same again.

I am referring, of course, to the loft conversion at Ink Towers, which began about a week ago. Until yesterday, the workmen had spent most of the time up in the loft itself, preparing the floor, putting in Velux windows, and so on. But work entered a new phase yesterday, for a large hole was cut in the ceiling of the main bedroom and the landing, and a section of the wall that divides the two spaces was removed, as you can see from the dramatic photograph posted above. This was to make way for the new staircase, which is being assembled and installed as I type these words.

Because cutting through a ceiling is a messy business, I was advised to retreat from my office -- whose entrance you can see in the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph -- and to take refuge downstairs while the airborne toxic event was created inside the bizarre plastic bubble that the workmen had created with giant plastic sheets. And so, pens, book, and Clairefontaine notebook in hand, I moved down to the dining table and carried on with my work while almighty hell was unleashed upstairs.

After about an hour, I started to get anxious. Some would put this down to autistic obsession, no doubt, but I would locate the source of my unease in the fact that I was temporarily unable to reach my ink (which is stored in a large box in my office). I was suffering, that is to say, from a terrible case of separation inkxiety. Although I had two fountain pens on the table in front of me -- a Pelikan M200 and a Sailor Sapporo -- and although they had been filled to the brim with ink earlier that day, I began to wonder how I would manage if I wrote so much that they both ran dry, or if I simply became bored with the colours and needed to change them as a matter of urgency. As each new word unfurled from the nib, my anxiety grew. Would this, I fretted, be the mark with which the pen gave up the ghost?

In the end, the airborne toxic event was scurried away before I ran out of ink or had a change of heart about my choice of colours, and I regained access to my office and my precious ink box late in the afternoon. For once, that is to say, there was a happy ending. The latest phase of the loft conversion has revealed some of the original brickwork of Ink Towers, moreover, and I have taken great delight in inkspecting elements of the house that have, I believe, not seen the light of day since the building was constructed in 1901. The bricks that you can see in the photograph posted above, for instance, have been hidden away for over a hundred years. I like to think that when they last looked out upon the world, they saw someone holding a fountain pen, as would have been perfectly common at the time, and that the architect's plans that decided their destiny were drawn up with luxurious ink.

Perhaps, though, I should simply move out of Ink Towers while construction is underway. I like my routines, and I like to have control over the space in which I live and work, so something as radical as a loft conversion is bound to be deeply disruptive for a being as fragile as I. And it turns out that there is a perfect place for me to take up temporary residence. Thanks to Michigan-based honorary Penquod crew member Gerry, I now know that there is a town in Arkansas quite simply called Ink. Gerry spotted a reference to it in a review of Roads to Quoz a new book by William Least Heat-Moon. Here is how the reviewer inktroduces the curious geographical fact:

Mr. Heat-Moon is the kind of guy who cannot drive by a handmade sign advertising "Tupelo Honey and Mayhaw Jelly" without heading down the side road, buying a jar and spending a good part of the day talking to the folks selling it. He's an avid listener and compulsive recorder of linguistic oddities and quirks. In Arkansas he mulls over its rich menu of town names: Greasy Corner, Figure Five, Number Nine, Possum Grape, Tomato, Hog Eye, Kingdoodle Knob, Pencil Bluff and Ink. The story about Ink is that when it came time for the citizens of the town to vote for an official name, their ballot had the instructions: "Write in ink." Probably apocryphal, he admits, but he can't resist passing it on.

I have consulted Google Maps, and Ink sits like a stubborn blot on Highway 88:



I am about to ring my local travel agent to check the availability of direct flights from Cardiff International Airport (essentially a large shed, a few picnic tables, and some spare tarmac probably left over from the construction of the M4) to Ink, Arkansas. I will be leaving my bottles of ink behind, it's true, but I'll never be far from ink in Ink.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Standard Brown; Diamine Grey.

Confinkdence

May I confide in you?

I happened to be reading an article in last weekend's Sunday Times some days ago, dear readers, in which the author revealed some of the secrets used by top actors in order to exude supreme confidence. While I am not particularly interested in being a man of great confidence -- being a great confidence man is much closer to the truth ... or so I would have you believe -- I read on out of curiosity.

I was particularly struck by the 'Actors' tips for life' with which the article concluded. The first of these was: Never stand with your arms folded. It looks defensive. I'm clearly destined for nothingness, for I regularly stand with my arms folded as a matter of principle, especially when I am forced to talk to people, because it seems to me that defensiveness is the only sensible option. The great Roland Barthes was right, I feel, when he said, in a course given at the Collège de France in 1977-8, that 'there is always a terrorism of the question; a power is implied in every question. The question denies the right not to know or the right to indeterminate desire'. Whoever poses a question, he continues, entraps the other person in a dilemma: to answer or not to answer. And the latter offers no satisfactory escape, for simply refusing to respond 'very quickly leads the one who doesn't answer to death, erasure, or madness'. 'What we must do', he concludes, '[…] is to learn how to denaturalize questioning'. Where better to begin than with folded arms?

But it was the third tip that really caught my eye: To ooze charisma, imagine you have a wonderful secret you are keeping to yourself. I make no secret of my love of secrets; it has been listed in my 'Interests' on the right-hand side of this page for as long as I can remember. The only problem is that secrets, I feel, are meant to be revealed, and the pleasure in telling a secret inevitably becomes regret at the simultaneous death of that secret. (Isn't this sense of loss running right through 'My Secret Love', one of the highlights of Calamity Jane? Isn't there something desperately sad about the line, 'And my secret love's no secret any more'? Wasn't it better when it was secret, dear Doris?)

I think that the tip about imagining 'a wonderful secret' really struck a chord this week because of a dramatic experience involving a fountain pen and a silk pocket square. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have recently become mildly obsessed by pocket squares, and I can now report that I have made the effete leap into the world of silk flamboyance. Yes, dear readers, after many hours of research, I crept out into Cardiff in heavy disguise and splashed out on an absurdly decadent Crombie pocket square. The Inkette has since bought me two more, so the collection is puffing out like, well, a silk handkerchief.

I kept the excessive objects secreted in a drawer for several days, taking them out at regular intervals to marvel at their majesty. But they're too pretty to wear!, I kept saying to myself as I folded them carefully and returned them to storage. Secretly, I think, I was a little unsure about going public with my new identity. (Is this how cross-dressers feel just before stepping out in drag for the first time?) The pocket square is something of a dying animal, and I believe that it disappeared almost entirely from the South Wales area following The Great Silk Lynching of '56, in which a group of square-flaunting gentlemen were rounded up, forced to watch a rugby match, and run out of Cardiff by a mob of sportswear-clad hooligans. Anxious questions ran through my head as I tried to pluck up courage to walk out into the world with my silk in place. Will people point and laugh? Will my beloved square be torn from my pocket by burly thugs and trampled underfoot? What have I got myself into? Is it too late to go back to a life of empty breast pockets?

After downing six espressos for confidence on Thursday morning ('Italian courage', I like to call it), I arranged my square in my pocket, donned my overcoat, and stepped out into the world. As I walked through the city with my coat wrapped around me, I found myself feeling more confident than ever before. It was, I soon realized, all down to the silk square that was hidden beneath my outerwear. I had a secret, and none of the passersby had the slightest inkling. At one point, I even slipped my hand inside my coat to check that the square was still in place. It was, and my stature grew further as I felt the silk between my fingers. Citizens!, I wanted to cry. You are completely unaware that I am sporting a silk pocket square! A pocket square made of silk, I tell you!

As I was removing my hand, my fingers brushed against a smooth piece of plastic. To my surprise, I found that my Noodler's-Walnut-filled Sailor 1911 fountain pen was still clipped to the inside pocket of my overcoat, where I had placed it a day or two earlier. A quick pat of my other pocket revealed the presence of a Clairefontaine notebook that had been stored there at the same time as the 1911. What more, I sighed, could I possibly need? I was strolling proudly down the street with three magnificent secrets burning holes in my pockets. My heart was beating proudly beneath silk, ink, and paper. No sniper's bullet or sharpened biro, I decided, stood a chance against this mighty shield. I felt inkvincible, and I believe that the secret nature of the three sacred items contributed greatly to my newfound sense of stature. To walk through the world with pockets secretly overflowing with ink, silk, and paper is to become inkmortal. By secreting them, by keeping them in confidence, I magically grew in confidence.

Inks lending confidence today: Noodler's Walnut; Herbin Bleu Nuit.

PS (4 November): Apropos of nothing in particular, apart from the interest of several readers of Ink Quest in road signs, I cannot resist sharing with you this wonderful story from the BBC Wales news site about things getting spectacularly lost in translation.