I'd Like to Teach the World to Ink

The world has a lot to learn.

I called into my local pen shop on Saturday afternoon to see if there were any new inks for sale. There weren't, so I started to make my way to the door before the owner spotted me. (You may remember from previous posts, dear readers, that I'm convinced that he hates me and that a 'Here we go again with the lunatic' expression appears upon his face whenever I walk in.) On my way to the exit, however, I spotted a man buying a shiny Parker Sonnet. As I was passing, the assistant asked him if he would like any ink to go with his new pen. 'Yes, please', he said. When the assistant then asked which colour he'd like, the man replied 'Well, it's going to be either black or blue, isn't it?' Before I could scream 'No!', the assistant politely pointed out that the shop stocks something like twenty different shades of fountain pen ink. The man seemed genuinely surprised to discover this. 'I thought you could only get black and blue', I heard him say as I slipped out of the shop.

How could someone willing to spend around £100 on a fountain pen be unaware of the world of colour now at his fingertips? I don't mean that to sound like the patronizing words of an expert; I would never dream of describing myself as anything more than an amateur (an obsessed one, I admit) when it comes to ink. It wasn't the man's fault, in fact. As I've said several times here, dear readers, we live in a culture that repeatedly tells us that black and blue are the only acceptable colours for everyday use. In such circumstances, it's not difficult to see how someone could come to believe that black and blue are the only two shades of fountain pen ink in existence.

As I walked back across the city to meet the Inkette, I gave some thought to what might be done about this unfortunate state of affairs. As I work in education, my first idea was a detailed programme of ink study -- some doubters and ballpoint lovers would probably call it inkdoctrination -- for all schools in the UK. English and Welsh schools (I'm not sure about the situation in Scotland and Northern Ireland) are already bound by something called the National Curriculum, so why not, I thought, develop something called the National Currinkculum that could run alongside? Every day could begin with a pledge of allegiance to the giant, totemic fountain pen that would be placed in the corner of every classroom, and pupils could be given special awards for inventive choices of ink used to write their homework.

I was thinking about the flaws in this rather ambitious plan when I turned the corner into Queen Street (Cardiff's main shopping area). For as long as I can remember, Saturdays have brought various religious groups to the street. Years ago there used to be a man with a board that simply read 'Jesus Saves'. He would hand out leaflets and tell passers-by that they were on their way to hell. Unfortunately, he would often stand next to the Principality Building Society, which gave his 'Jesus Saves' sign an unintentionally amusing connotation. On Saturday, though, I noticed that things have taken a new twist. Presumably in an attempt to win the souls of the youth, the Salvation Army has gone all hip hop. In front of an exceedingly loud PA, three men were dressed like Eminem and were rapping about the Messiah. The sound was a bit muffled, but I'm pretty sure that one of the lines was 'Jesus wants you to join his crew'.

I have no interest in any religion, but it struck me that my ink education programme could be taken to 'the streetz' in a similar way. Perhaps I should get some leisure wear and a baseball cap, set up my 'sound system' at the other end of Queen Street next weekend, and send out a big shout to the world about the miracle of ink. The Inkette could be roped in to hand out little bottles to the crowds. People would find their lives changed, their souls saved, by my message. They would leave behind their sinful dabblings with ballpoints. Reverend Ink is coming...

Ink in use today: NB's Green/Black mixture. (I have finally mastered this shade, dear readers, with a little help from one of your number, one of the congregation.)

Purity and Danger

Where do you draw the line between one colour and another?

As I mentioned nearly two weeks ago, I'm currently hard at work in the laboratory, striving for the perfect green-black. I've been mixing together Noodler's Black and Private Reserve Avacado (sic) in different proportions, but I can't quite get the balance right. I want a colour that swaggers nonchalantly between green and black, daring its viewers to decide on which side of the fence it falls. I want pure undecidability in my written words, in other words. So far, though, I've ended up with a black that only surrenders its greenness if you hold a gun to its head, and a green that looks like it has spent the day working down a coalmine. The experiments must continue, and I'm about to advertise for a research assistant.

Meanwhile, the universe continues to conspire against me. I've been having a little trouble with the piston on my Pelikan M200, and I've read that the problem can be solved by the application of a tiny drop of pure silicone grease. 'But it must be pure', the experts stress. And that's where my problems began. I've spent far too much time over the last couple of days obsessively searching the internet for UK stockists and manufacturers of 100% pure silicone grease. I eventually found a company that appears to make such a thing, and I'm ashamed to say that I even went so far as to download from their website a .pdf file that detailed the precise chemical composition of the product. (I haven't studied Chemistry since I took an 'O' Level in the subject in 1987, so the data made little sense. Why couldn't it just say 'Ingredients: silicone'?)

Having memorized the name of the product, I sauntered into a couple of shops in the small town where I live. One was a general DIY store, and the other was a shop devoted to cars and their maintenance. Neither place stocked the object of my desire, but both shop owners unfortunately asked me why I was looking for such a thing. 'It's for a troublesome piston on a fountain pen', I now know, is a phrase that's likely to make you few friends in a testosterone-drenched environment.

I then tried a large electrical store in Cardiff city centre, and I was astonished to find that the silicone grease was a product apparently held in stock. But that's when the real problems began. Unable to find the tube on the shelves, I asked for assistance. 'It's there in front of you', said the man, reaching over and handing me a tube that bore no resemblance to the one that I'd seen on the company's website. 'Are you sure this is the right stuff -- 100% pure silicone grease?', I asked. 'Yes, that'll be fine', he replied. 'They've probably just changed the packaging'. 'But it's very important that I have the right stuff?', I stressed. 'What kind of electrical work are you doing?', he queried. 'I'm not. It's for a troublesome piston on a fountain pen', I wearily said. 'Oh, that'll be okay', he said (in a manner that struck me as a little too casual).

As the tube was only £3.49, and as I was starting to feel particularly out of place (did I see one of the other assistants reaching for the panic button beneath the counter?), I decided to risk buying the item. All the way home in the car, I fretted about putting the contents of the tube inside one of my precious fountain pens. I eventually decided to take the plunge and plunge the alleged silicone grease into the Pelikan. I waited in silence for an explosion, a puff of smoke, or the smell of melting plastic. Nothing happened, however, and the piston now seems to be working properly again. But have I introduced some dreadful impurity to what was once a sterile environment? Will the damage unfold over years? Will the inauthentic compound react with my inks to release a mind-altering gas that turns me into a lover of ballpoints? Please let me know, dear readers, if you notice that I've started to behave strangely... (Yes, Inkette, I can already hear your reply.)

Inks in use today: NB's prototype green-black (batch number 53); Noodler's Nightshade.

People in the Sun

We're burning up here.

The UK is currently experiencing a heatwave. Yesterday was the hottest July day in Wales on record: 93.5 degrees in Newport, which is about fifteen miles from Ink Towers. We have a sea breeze here, so we're not suffering quite as badly as people who are inland, but it was still pretty unbearable. I've heard from a friend in London that the temperature on the buses there was close to 120 degrees. My plan for yesterday afternoon was to sit and do some work in one of the university's libraries, but it turned out that the building lacks air-conditioning. I stayed for about ten minutes, but then the heat started to do strange things to my brain.

It's at times like these that the UK's inability to cope with any kind of weather that deviates from drizzle becomes crushingly apparent. What makes this heatwave excruciating is not the temperature itself; the problem, rather, is that we lack air-conditioning in far too many obvious places (offices, trains and buses, cars, homes, and so on). I quite happily survived a week of 115-degree heat in Las Vegas a couple of summers ago, but that was because everything is climate-controlled there. (Well, almost everything. The Inkette still hasn't forgiven me for taking her to the suburbs in search of a bookshop on a bus with broken air-conditioning. I've never felt such heat ... and then there was the inferno inside the vehicle. There were, quite literally, pools of sweat all down the aisle.) The UK is grinding to a halt because we're still living in the nineteenth century. (I actually saw someone weakly waving a paper fan on a sweltering train yesterday.) And it's not just heat that brings us to our knees: the annual inch of snow in the middle of the winter always provokes panic-buying of bread and milk, shortly followed by the closure of most of the nation's roads. (Why milk? What's so special about milk? Is there some kind of frostbite-defeating recipe involving a split-tin loaf and a glass of semi-skimmed that I don't know about? Wouldn't it be better to stock up on something that's actually going to keep the hunger pangs at bay, like a big bag of pasta? I fear that I know the answer, though: it's the British belief that any catastrophe can be negated by the preparation of a cup of milky tea. If we ever find out that the planet is going to be destroyed in three minutes by an incoming asteroid, the UK's national power grid will buckle under the weight of 60 million kettles being switched on.)

That was a rather long rant against my homeland, wasn't it? Should I expect to be dragged to the Tower of London any moment now? Will my head shortly appear on a spike (and would they use a ballpoint pen, just to spite me)? As the Inkette said only the other day: 'I'm married to the most miserable, problem-seeking man in the history of the world'. What has all of this got to do with ink? I'll tell you....

I've noticed that the heat has being doing strange things to my ink. Unless my eyes are deceiving me (I've just remembered a brilliant Reeves and Mortimer gag in which Vic asks if his eyes are deceiving him, holds a microphone up to his eyes, and hears something like 'You're a very handsome man'), colour was the first thing to be affected. I've been writing with Sailor Brown today, but it's coming out much lighter and more yellow-tinted than is usual. Shade, it seems, changes when there is no shade. But it's not just colour, dear readers, for flow is also being affected. I filled my Stipula with Noodler's Walnut yesterday. This isn't normally a very good combination, as the ink tends not to flow perfectly through the italic nib. (My love for the colour often drives me to overlook this practicality.) In the shimmering, humid library yesterday afternoon, though, the Walnut rushed from the nib like water over Niagara Falls. The world has well and truly been turned upside down.

I like the idea of writing with something that reacts to the climate. Ballpoint pens are the same always and everywhere, and it's precisely this relentless homogeneity that I find so boring. A fountain pen, on the other hand, is a kind of barometer, and its ink has chameleon-like qualities. Never let it be said that users of fountain pens aren't prepared to change with the times.

Ink in use today: Sailor Brown.

We Meet At Last, Elusive One

I have finally looked the Great Brown Whale in the eye.

As I reported last Sunday, one of the readers of Ink Quest, having read about my trans-continental pursuit of Omas Sepia, very kindly offered to send me some lines written with the elusive ink. The letter arrived from Germany towards the end of this week, and I was thrilled finally to see what the Great Brown Whale looks like when captured on paper. It really is a unique colour with spectacular shading, and I'm more desperate than ever to track down my own bottle. (Some other readers of Ink Quest have generously provided me with names of overseas stockists, and I've come very close to crumbling, but I think that I need to trap the beast by hand.) The generous reader from Germany also showed me various other inks that he though might be germane to my quest, so I now have several other objects of desire (Rohrer and Klingner Sepia, for instance) to pursue.

While I was writing a reply last night (the Inkette was out for the night, so I was free to play with my inks for hours on end; never let it be said that I don't know how to live it up on a Saturday evening), another of ink's wonderful properties became apparent to me: every one of my thirty-something shades comes in a glass bottle. There might be one or two varieties out there that come in plastic containers, but most are housed in glass.

Why does this matter? I shall, as so often, have to answer with a rant about the way of the world. I'm becoming increasingly disturbed by the number of foodstuffs that were once sold in glass bottles but are now being relaunched in plastic 'squeezy' containers. This happened to tomato ketchup and numerous barbecue products in the UK several years ago, but things really became serious when Marmite -- that sacred, quintessentially British product that is despised, as far as I can tell, by the rest of the world -- recently went 'squeezy'. This, for me, was the final straw. The whole point of the classic glass bottle was that it looked like a 'marmite'!

I take this turn to 'squeeziness' as yet another sign of modern laziness and reverse evolution. In short, 'squeezy' is easy. No need to use your opposable thumb to unscrew a lid and insert a utensil; just grab the cold plastic container in your paw and squeeze out a dollop onto the prey that you've just savaged on the plains. 'Squeezy' packaging is to foodstuffs what the biro is to writing: dull, lazy, characterless, disposable, and ecologically dubious.

The beauty of ink, I feel, is that it will never go 'squeezy'. Its containers will remain glass and, in doing so, transparently retain their class.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.

Slipping Up

I've been too soft with my words.

I recently ordered a pile of books for the University library in preparation for the beginning of the new academic year in September. To place an order, members of staff need to fill in a little pink slip that's about the size of an index card, onto which all of the relevant information (author, title, ISBN, price, and so on) must be written by hand. We then pass this on to our departmental library representative (let's call her Siân, although that's not her real name), who signs them and sends them on their way to the library's ordering department.

I thought that I'd chosen a nice selection of inks for completing my slips, and I wrote the information with my beautiful Stipula italic nib. I can remember thinking, as I dropped the pile of forms into Siân's pigeonhole, how nice it would be to receive something that looked so pretty.

How wrong I was. I received an email from Siân this afternoon, in which she very politely asked if I could use biro for the next batch. I'd forgotten, you see, that the slips are multi-part forms that produce carbon copies for different sections of the library. And because I'd used a fountain pen (which, as I've discussed in previous posts, only requires a very light touch), the copies had come out blank. Rather than send the forms back to me and delay the process, Siân, bless her soul, had filled in the missing information herself. I would send a 'Thank You' note, but I'm a little anxious about using a fountain pen to write it. Wouldn't this seem like an act of defiance? Wouldn't the words be negated by the very instrument that had been used to inscribe them?

I will, of course, be unable to order a book for the library ever again. How could I write the title of an important, world-changing book in biro? Wouldn't this seem like an act of defiance? Wouldn't the value of the text be negated by the very instrument that had been used to order it?

While wrestling with these ethical issues, I've been thinking again about trying to make new colours by mixing some of my inks. Some of you, dear readers, might remember an earlier Ink Quest entry in which I recorded my first foray into this dangerous, forbidden terrain. Those youthful experiments were not too successful, so I haven't dabbled again since. However, someone posted a rather interesting recipe in one of the Fountain Pen Network's forums a day or two ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. It's a mixture of Noodler's Black and Private Reserve Avacado (the company's spelling), and the pictures accompanying the post showed an intriguing green-black shade. I very rarely use my Avacado, as it tends -- in its untamed form -- to make me feel a little nauseous, so this is the perfect way to give it a second chance. I don't want something that's too green; a black with a subtle, sophisticated, charming wink of green, on the other hand, sounds deeply appealing. I shall retire to the laboratory, don the goggles, fire up the reactor, and report back.

Ink in use today: Conway Stewart Brown.

The Inkredible Hulk

'This whole universe is against me!'

Thus spoke George Costanza in an episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Apology', during which he finds himself being taken to Rage-aholics Anonymous. 'They want me to bottle it up', he tells Jerry the next day. 'It makes me so mad!'

I feel more than ever this evening, dear readers, that the whole universe is against me, and I probably ought to be checking the Yellow Pages to see if there's a Rage-aholics Anonymous chapter in South Wales.

Allow me to explain. I have been doing battle with one of Britain's biggest DIY stores for several months over their inability to install a new bathroom in Ink Towers. When it became clear that they were happy to take the money but then prove unable to give us a date for delivery or installation, we cancelled the whole thing. That's when the real problems began, for the company has, due to total ineptitude rather than fraudulent intentions, consistently failed to refund the full amount to my credit card. They managed to deal with most of the figure, but £77.96 remained outstanding, and I've been trying to sort out this glitch for weeks on end. I've clearly developed something of a Costanza-like reputation, though, because the people at the Customer Services Centre now seem to recognize my voice. Better still, when the courier came to collect the flooring that had already been delivered, I stood outside his van while he radioed HQ for an authorization code to put on the receipt that I insisted on having. 'Are you at Mr [insert my name here]'s house?', said the voice on the other end, unaware that I was standing nearby. 'Yes', replied the driver. 'Oh, he's a right f***ing troublemaker', came the response. (There weren't delicate asterisks in his comment, dear readers; I just don't want anyone to get offended and report me for 'objectionable content'.)

Anyway, to cut a very long story short, I finally lost my temper this afternoon when another 'We'll call you back' came to nothing. Ringing the Customer Services Centre yet again, I insisted that 'this whole sorry affair' be sorted out by the end of the day. I think, at the risk of speaking too soon, that this worked, for I've now had a call from the local store, my card number has been taken, and the refund is apparently going through tonight. (Don't worry, dear readers, the place of ink in this tale will soon be revealed. Just hang on in there.)

Now that the war seems to be over, I have just written a long letter to the CEO of the company, in which I list the entire catalogue of errors and ask for an investigation. When I'd finished ranting, I rang the Head Office to get the name and address of the individual in question. I was expecting my voice to be recognized, alarms to sound, and my call to be terminated, but the woman on the switchboard told me the CEO's name and then put me through to a curious automated service that read out the address to me. I came off the phone feeling calmer, feeling that perhaps the whole universe isn't against me. As I stood up from my desk, however, I realized that the pen which I'd been using to write down the information had somehow leaked Diamine Royal Blue ink all over my favourite white shirt. I would turn into the Inkredible Hulk and smash down a few buildings if this wouldn't mean splitting the same precious shirt with my green muscles. I have, therefore, quietly placed it into the washing machine and started a hot wash. Like Costanza, I shall just have to bottle it up...

Inks in use today: Diamine Royal Blue (aaaaarrrrggh!!), Mont Blanc Bordeaux, Conway Stewart Brown.

My Secret Life

'There are a lot of sexual undertones here'.

This was the opinion of Ink Quest voiced this morning by the Inkette's sister, who stayed with us last night. The Inkette had shown her the blog for the first time, in what I suspect to have been an attempt to prove just how pathetic and uninteresting my life really is. (I'm sure that it worked.) And to think that I'd made them both gallons of fresh coffee this morning... After reading the entries closely, Sister Ink, who's an English teacher, decided that Ink Quest has a subtext, a hidden message. 'He's cheating on you', she remarked to the Inkette at one point, 'with ink!'. 'Look', she added, 'he's arranged "business trips" just so that he can meet up with the object of his desire behind your back. And he's talking about how, once he's got his hands on a new ink, he's already thinking about the next acquisition. He's such a philanderer!' (Here's something strange: etymologically, 'philanderer' means 'one who is fond of men', but it's normally used in contemporary English to mean quite the opposite. How did this shift in meaning happen? There's a PhD thesis to be written on the subject, I'm sure.)

I responded to this character assassination by pointing out that my love of ink has always been extremely public. It's narrated on the internet for all to see, after all. And it's not as if I have my precious bottles hidden away in the attic in a box marked 'Miscellaneous paperwork'; they're out in the open on my desk. This is not, in other words, a secret affair. I am not ashamed of my love of ink, and I do not see why this love should be forbidden from speaking its name. I am not a philanderer; I am a philinkerer, and I am proud to shout this from the rooftops.

The quest for the perfect ink, moreover, is not ultimately about possession, for I don't believe, as I stated in my very first entry, that there really is a perfect ink out there that, once owned, will bring the search to an end. Proust, who writes better about desire than anyone I can think of, sums this up perfectly towards the end of The Prisoner when he writes: 'There must be something inaccessible in what we love, something to pursue; we love only what we do not possess...'

As you know, dear readers, the one ink that has constantly eluded me is Omas Sepia, the Great Brown Whale. I have chased the mythical beast across from Europe to the United States and back again, but it has always slipped through my fingers. (I could, of course, simply order a bottle from one of the pen dealers in the United States that stocks the colour, but that would, I feel, be too easy. If I'm going to get hold of a bottle, I'm doing it with my bare, but slightly ink-stained, hands.) I have never even seen what the fugitive ink looks like on paper. Until now, that is. One of your number, dear readers, has offered to send me a sheet of paper with some lines scribbled in Omas Sepia upon it. I have accepted the kind invitation, and I shall let you know how it feels to take one step closer to the Great Brown Whale when the sample arrives. I'm already extremely excited at the thought of catching a glimpse of the colour, but I'm just as curious about what the words might say? 'You'll never catch me'? 'Philanderer'?

Ink in use today: Mont Blanc Bordeaux.

On No Work of Words

In a memorable episode of Seinfeld, Jerry and George find themselves commissioned to write a pilot for the NBC television company. George decides that the show will be about 'nothing', but our two heroes find it impossible to commit even this idea to paper as they sit in Jerry's apartment, finding endless excuses not to start work.

I feel like George every moment of my life, but I'm feeling extra Costanza-ish today. I had great plans, dear readers, to write all day and finally to crack the chapter that's been driving me insane for weeks. But I seem to be prepared to do anything but write this morning. So far, I've made myself several espressos, eaten an apple (and resisted the temptation to go out for a pecan and maple syrup pastry), played with the cats, phoned a friend and British Gas, tried to comb my hair down flat (I failed miserably; if I have the spirit of Costanza, I have the follicles of Kramer), checked my emails a worrying number of times, and filled a pen with an ink that, deep down, I knew I wasn't going to be able to write with (Herbin Vert Olive). While rinsing out the pen, I thought that it was probably time that I updated my list of inks. Here's the inkventory as it currently stands, then, dear readers:

Conway Stewart Blue
Conway Stewart Brown
Diamine Dark Brown
Diamine Golden Brown
Diamine Grey
Diamine Prussian Blue
Diamine Royal Blue
Diamine Sepia (two bottles)
Diamine Umber
Herbin Lie de Thé (bottle and cartridges)
Herbin Terre de Feu
Herbin Vert Olive
Levenger Cocoa
Mont Blanc Bordeaux
Mont Blanc Sepia
Montegrappa Red
Noodler's Black
Noodler'’s Britannia'’s Blue Waves
Noodler's Lexington Gray
Noodler'’s Nightshade
Noodler's Walnut
Omas Grey
Papyrus Sepia
Parker Blue (cartridges)
Pilot Black (cartridges)
Private Reserve Avacado (sic)
Private Reserve Tanzanite
Sailor Blue (cartridges)
Sailor Brown
Sheaffer Skrip Brown
Visconti Brown
Waterman Florida Blue
Waterman Havana
Yard-o-Led Sepia

All this procrastination has been worth it, however, as I've finally figured out, while doing nothing of consequence, a way to finish off the chapter that's been hanging around for far too long. I have now filled another pen with a suitable ink, and I'm ready to let my deathless prose take shape on the page and, of course, change the shape of the world. Shakespeare was wrong: something will come of nothing.

Inks in use today: Herbin Vert Olive (briefly); Herbin Lie de Thé.

Painting the Town Red

Oh, the pain...

I'm beginning to think that painting the front door and the railings outside my house on a day when the temperature was over eighty degrees was not a good idea. Even though I made sure to drink plenty of water while I was working, I feel a little dehydrated. And the back of my neck has evidently caught the sun, for it's been burning steadily all evening.

It won't surprise you to learn, dear readers, that the day's events are somehow related to ink. As I laboured in the sunshine, I started to think about the colours that were flowing (well, splattering, to be more precise) from my brush. The door, which has faded in the three years that have elapsed since we moved in, was recoated from the tin of lovely deep red that the previous owner was kind enough to leave behind. Meanwhile, Mrs Ink went to the DIY shop to choose a colour for the railings, and she came back with a brilliant red that's very similar to the shade used on postboxes and the old telephone kiosks in Britain. While I was carefully splashing myself and the pavement, I happened to notice that none of the houses in my terrace has the same colour door or railings. There's nothing eccentric or spectacular about the row -- it's an ordinary late Victorian block in an ordinary seaside town -- but we've all chosen to decorate our individual homes in very different ways. And there's nothing eccentric about this, either. I don't know how other cultures organize themselves when it comes to the decoration of the exteriors of houses, but it's very common in Britain to see a row of dwellings with lots of different colours on show.

This isn't remotely surprising, as to wander into the paint section of any DIY shop is to confront an endless array of colours. A visitor to the Dulux Paint shelves, for instance, might be looking for a bland neutral colour, but s/he will somehow have to distinguish between Potters' Clay, Chalk Blush, Dusted Moss, Bleached Lichen, Natural Taupe, Quartz Flint, Mineral Haze, and Clouded Slate. And that's just in the 'calm, neutral' section of the Dulux colour chart, which is organized by 'mood' (I couldn't see a section entitled 'Totally Bewildered' or 'Irritated by Dulux's Decision to Organize their Paints by "Mood"', however).

Dulux is probably the most well-known paint manufacturer in the UK (and possibly elsewhere; I think that I'll save the trans-cultural statistical analysis of paint suppliers for a rainy day). Parker, meanwhile, remains the most famous pen manufacturer. If you look at the website of the latter, though, you'll find that they offer ink in just five colours: black, blue-black, blue, red, and green. And of those five, most people would, I think, only think of using blue, blue-black, or blue for everyday writing.

It's clear that something is wrong. The world is hideously out of balance. We're happy to live in a society that offers hundreds of different shades of paint for our houses, but we limit the choice to just two or three colours when it comes to inscribing our private thoughts in a diary, penning a passionate love letter, or making the apparently unique mark that is our signature. Can you imagine the riots that would ensue if people woke up to find that they could now paint their houses in just three bland colours? And can you, by the same token, imagine an angry mob picketing WH Smith (Britain's best-known chain of stationers, dear overseas readers) to demand the stocking of a hundred different writing inks?

We've clearly painted ourselves into a corner. No one seems bothered by the fact that we're being brushed off when it comes to the business of writing. Yes, online ink retailers offer inkthusiasts the chance to purchase hundreds of different colours, but I want to see these colours in the High Street. Perhaps it is time for a new political organization -- The Ink Party -- to be launched. People Need Ink! Unlike our rivals, we'd be inkorruptible, and our manifesto would be handwritten in the finest, most vibrant ink. Our rallying song would be a reworked version of 'Jerusalem':

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my fountain pen sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
From green, sepia and other pleasant shades of ink .

Ink in use today: Diamine Golden Brown.