That Obscure Object of Desire

And so the voyage continues.

I left you on the edges of your seats yesterday, dear readers, as I prepared finally to fill my favourite pen with the one ink, Omas Sepia, that has slipped through my fingers time and again. As I eventually drifted off to sleep last night, I can remember thinking about whether or not the Ink Quest, which has been driven for so long by a desire for the Great Brown Whale, could go on.

It can. It will.

Omas Sepia is a perfectly pleasant colour, and it gives some lovely shading when used with Blue Beauty's 1.1mm italic nib, but capturing the Great Brown Whale has not, I've discovered, killed off the desire for other inks. I've been writing very happily with it all day, and I'm delighted at how pretty my Rhodia notepad looks when covered with the trail of the elusive beast, but I'm just not entirely satisfied.

This has nothing to do with the ink itself, I fear. In fact, I don't think -- as I believe I stated right at the very beginning of the Ink Quest, over a year ago -- that any ink out there could bring the search to an end. Even if I were to stumble across an ink that had been objectively classified as perfect by an international team of scientists who had all won the Nobel Prize for services to ink, I'd still be thinking 'Hmm, but maybe there's something better out there'.

Let me be more specific. Even though the ink that I've wandered half way around the world for is now in my possession, I've been thinking all day about the Rohrer and Klingner shades that the good people at The Writing Desk are soon to start selling. But even if I were to buy those tomorrow, I'd already be thinking about the next acquisition. And then the next.

It's simple: I can't be satisfied. My desire is a desire for nothing nameable.

I've spent a great deal of today worrying about how I might have ruined the Ink Quest by having a bottle of Omas Sepia shipped in from New York. All I could think of what was happened to Moonlighting when the scriptwriters made the disastrous decision to allow Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd to get together. Suddenly the magic was gone. In getting what they really wanted, the characters drove the audience into a state of frisson-free boredom. Perhaps, I thought, it's better never to obtain the object of your desire.

But I've realized that Omas Sepia was not what I really wanted. It is merely one chapter in the infinite Ink Quest that has come to an end; the tale goes on. The true object of my desire -- the perfect ink, the Whale -- will always be obscure, just over the horizon, blowing a tantalizing spray of coloured liquid into the sky. The Ink Quest will continue until, like Captain Ahab, I am finally ruined by the pursuit of the impossible. Freud wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle about the 'compulsion to repeat', and it's clear that I have a terrible compulsion to repeat the purchasing of ink. But there is no cure, no analyst's couch upon which I can lie or rely for help. I'm inksatiable. I don't need a shrink; I just need ink.

Ink in use today: You don't need me to tell you that, do you?

'Thus, I give up the spear!'

Call me Ink Male.

I type these words with trembling hands, dear readers, and my heart is racing. Yes, it has finally happened -- the Great Brown Whale that is Omas Sepia has arrived upon these shores.

As I strolled into the office this morning with Bob Dylan's 'Idiot Wind' playing on my headphones (the only song with which to start the week, I gather), I noticed that the building felt different. The corridors had a strange feel to them. I could smell the ocean, taste the salt in the air. The staircase was slippery with blubber. I raced to the mailroom and unlocked the door. There, just below my pigeonhole, lay a package from the Fountain Pen Hospital in New York. I tore it open with my harpoon ... and finally held the elusive bottle in my hands.

There was just one problem: I'd come into work with two pens already filled with ink. I had, therefore, to teach, hold office hours, and deal with a wave of pointless administration with the Omas Sepia sitting unopened on the desk in front of me all day long. I swear that I heard laughter coming from within the box on several occasions.

That, however, was several hours ago. It is now 8.00pm, and I am at home. I have emptied Blue Beauty of its cargo of Diamine Indigo, and I am waiting patiently for the pen to dry. By sunrise I will be able to fill it with the ink that has eluded me for so long. But what, dear readers, will this do to the Ink Quest? Will the searching and the yearning come to a sudden end? Will I find in Omas Sepia everything that I have been looking for? Can I now pour all of my other inks down the drain and into the sea, which will roll on as it rolled five thousand years ago? Is it time to give up the spear? Is the drama done?

Inks in use today: Diamine Indigo; Noodler's Sequoia.

Have Ink, Will Travel

Nothing to be done.

I'm sitting here like one of Samuel Beckett's characters, waiting for my bottle of Omas Sepia to arrive from New York. With every tick of the clock I move a little closer to the edge of my seat, gnawing my nails progressively down to nothing. Where are you, Great Brown Whale? How much longer until we finally meet?

The waiting has briefly been interrupted by an announcement about new European Union regulations concerning the taking of liquids onto planes. From 6 November, passengers using EU airports to travel within the Union will be allowed to carry 100ml of 'liquid in a transparent re-sealable plastic bag' in their hand luggage.

At first I thought that this solved the recent problem of travelling with ink. (When flying, I usually carry and empty pen and a selection of cartridges in my hand luggage, but the panic about on-board liquids during the summer pitched my obsessive ritual into crisis. Ink suddenly became a suspicious substance.) But now I'm not quite sure what the new law allows. Does the liquid have to be poured into a plastic bag and carried loose, as it were? If I turn up at a European airport with a 90ml bottle of Noodler's ink, for instance, will I have to decant the precious fluid into a Ziploc before I'm allowed to take to the skies?

If this is the case, I have a solution. What I'm clearly going to need before I take my next foreign trips is one of those tall metal stands that are used in hospitals to hold plastic bags of liquids that are being dispensed by intravenous drip. I've been doing a little browsing on the internet, and I've discovered one that I like. It's pictured above, and I think that it will match my Smythson travel wallet rather well. I don't know how much it's going to cost, though, because it would appear that suppliers of medical equipment are distinctly reluctant to put their prices on the web. (I found another company that would rent one to me for two days for £20, but I want my own personal drip stand, thank you very much.)

If, then, you're passing through a European airport after 6 November, and if you should see someone wheeling an ink-bearing IV drip stand through the departure hall, you'll know that it's me. In fact, I might even take the Ink Quest to a new level by having some Noodler's Sequoia dripped from the stand into my veins. Yes, dear readers, I'm going inktravenous. Come fly with me.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Sequoia.

Reunited!

The panic is over.

After a sleepless night, I came into work this morning to find Blue Beauty sleeping underneath a sheet of paper on my desk. It looks well, if a little shaken by its first ever night away from me. I have fed it fresh ink, and it's now getting back to normal. I have reassured it that this will not happen again. 'One should never be where one does not belong', Bob Dylan once sang, and Blue Beauty belongs by my side at all times.

Inks in use today: Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon, Diamine Indigo, Noodler's Sequoia.

Missing In(k) Action

There's a gap in my life and an ache in my heart.

I've just laid out tomorrow's inks (always two, one for each pen that goes to work with me) for the nightly ritual of pen filling. I chose Herbin Lie de Thé and Noodler's Sequoia -- a fine autumnal combination -- and I've just reached into my briefcase to retrieve Blue Beauty, the faithful Stipula I Castoni that goes everywhere with me and produces most of my words.

But Blue Beauty, dear readers, is nowhere to be seen. The little Conway Stewart leather case in which it travels (I think of it as a papoose) is there, but it's traumatically empty. I have searched the briefcase several times, but it's no use -- Blue Beauty is missing. The Inkette has shown little sympathy: 'Oh well, you'll just have to use one of your sixteen other pens', she declared.

I used the missing pen in work this afternoon, and I know that it was on my desk at about 4pm, when I scribbled a note to myself on a Post It. But that's the last time I can remember being as one with Blue Beauty. I was, it's true, in a mad rush to get out of the building this evening, so perhaps I simply left it on my desk. By the time I'd realized that my precious one was missing, it was too late to make an emergency dash to the university, for the building in which I work is locked at 9.30pm. (I did consider calling the Security Division and demanding that they open up my office for me, but I don't think that their list of emergencies includes 'Absent-minded Lecturer has left pen on desk'.)

But what if Blue Beauty isn't on my desk when I turn up in the morning? What if it dropped out of my case as I walked to the railway station? What if it is lost and running desperately low on ink as it wanders around the city, looking for somewhere warm and dry to bed down? What if it falls in with a gang of street-dwelling ballpoints who are led by an evil monster called Fagink -- 'You've got to leak in a pocket or two, boys / You've got to leak in a pocket or two'? (I put the lyrics from Oliver! in there just to make it clear that 'Fagink' was not some nasty homophobic jibe, but I've now realized that the links between the character of Fagin and a long history of anti-semitic representation pose an entirely different problem. Oh dear...) Is it possible to file a Missing Pen report with the police? And who should I ring to have Blue Beauty's picture placed on the side of milk cartons?

I am now off to bed, but I doubt that I will sleep tonight. Inky tears will dampen my pillow.

Inks in use today: Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon; J. Herbin Terre de Feu.

Railing

There is a special hell for people who sit near me on public transport.

As you know, dear readers, I am deeply opposed to the presence of other members of the human race at the best of times. But there is one thing that is guaranteed to inspire even more misanthropic rage in me, and I have had to endure over four hours of it today. My train journey back to Ink Towers from the north of England was divided into two stages: from my point of departure to Birmingham, and from there back down to south Wales. When I got on the first train, I deliberately chose a seat that was far removed from other passengers. Happy in the solitary silence, I settled down with my book. At the next stop, however, the seat opposite me became occupied by a young man with a mobile phone that bleeped, whined, and blasted techno soundbites all the way to Birmingham. When it wasn't making such noises, he was, of course, talking (well, grunting) into it. I have memorized his face, and he will be one of the first against the wall when the Republic of Ink is founded under my dictatorship.

My blood pressure had reached such high levels by the time we arrived in Birmingham (I tried the Frank Costanza method of muttering 'Serenity now!' to myself, but it didn't work) that I decided to leave the station and wander around the city for a couple of hours. After a sandwich and an espresso, I went in search of the Great Western Arcade, where the town's branch of The Pen Shop is housed. As soon as I saw its sign in the distance, a feeling of calm came over me. Inside, I drooled over some rather expensive Pelikans (there were a couple of limited editions in the cabinet that I've never seen before) and then invested in a bottle of Caran d'Ache 'Grand Canyon', one of the company's new Colours of the Earth shades. It's not the cheapest ink around (£7.95 for just 30ml), but it does come in a beautiful, extremely heavy sculpted glass cube (I've taken a picture and posted it above for you to admire, dear readers).

After a quick trip to Muji to buy a gift for the Inkette, I headed back to New Street station, taking in the spectacular Selfridges building once again on my way. When my train arrived, I chose, as on the first leg of the journey, a seat that was as far away from other people as possible. Just as I opened my book, however, two extremely loud people splatted themselves down in front of me and proceeded to bleat absolute rubbish to each other for the next two hours. To make matters worse, a teenage girl got on at some point and, for the entire final fifteen minutes of the journey, shouted a series of Subway sandwich orders into her telephone. ('With lettuce and ... wait, no, without lettuce. And toasted. Yeah, cheese. Oh, maybe lettuce. No, I won't. Yeah, I will -- I'm feeling fat. Don't care as long as it's not Sprite. Meet me outside the station with it. No, not Sprite'.)

The strange thing, though, was that I remained calm throughout this double onslaught. What had infuriated me on the first train just washed over me on the second (a bit like a river of Sprite, perhaps). I can only assume that this was because the bottle of Grand Canyon was sitting in my bag, which was stashed directly above me in the overhead rack. It must have been watching over me, beaming down serenity from its prism-like body and enclosing me in an idiot-repelling protective shield. Once again, ink has prevented me from going off the rails.

Ink in use today: Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon (a gorgeously rich, dark brown).

Weakness

I am weak, but the Great Brown Whale made me do it.

As you know, dear readers, at the heart of the Ink Quest lies the endless pursuit of a particular ink, Omas Sepia, that has come to be known as the Great Brown Whale. I have chased it around the world, searched for it in London, Bristol, Oxford, Cardiff, Ghent, Chicago, Brussels, Bath, Las Vegas, and countless other cities. I've come close on one or two occasions, but the tricky creature has always slipped through my fingers.

Until now, that is. I have, I must confess, just ordered a bottle from The Fountain Pen Hospital, the legendary New York pen shop. (With the pound so strong against the dollar, I believe that $14 essentially translates into a free gift.) Once the shipping charges have been confirmed by email, the elusive Great Brown Whale will be heading towards these shores. I always vowed that I would never resort to ordering Omas Sepia over the internet, by post, or by telephone. The moment of capture, I insisted, had to be face to face. There was to be no cheating on my part, no relying upon someone else to reel the beast in and send it my way in a convenient package. I was to remain at the inky helm of my ship, the Penquod, and in hot pursuit until the bitter end.

But my will power has clearly been dissolved by so many hours of wandering and wondering. I could take it no more. Dozens of times I have visited the Fountain Pen Hospital's website, and dozens of times my cursor has hovered over the 'Buy' button next to Omas Sepia. Until this evening, however, I have always managed to resist. I don't quite know why I caved in today rather on than any of the other days. And I don't know what finally acquiring the Great Brown Whale will do to the Ink Quest. Will I finally be satisfied, happy, at one with the world? Will I round up all of my other inks, load them onto the Penquod, and dump them in Boston harbour? Will the Ink Quest come to an end?

Having made this life-changing decision, I am about to go away to give a talk at a university in the north of England, so I will be away for a couple of days and unable to update Ink Quest. Knowing my luck, I will step off the train to find a shop that sells nothing but Omas Sepia ink right outside the railway station. The Great Brown Whale must still have a trick or two up its sleeve. The quest can't end this easily.

Inks in use today: Sailor Brown; Diamine Indigo (in the Parker Duofold acquired at auction last Friday; it's working wonderfully).

The Crying of Lot 46

There's nothing like a good charity auction to get the weekend going with a bang.

When I'm not filling my spare time with the quest for the perfect ink, I volunteer as a fosterer for a local cat rescue charity. Cats and kittens that have been dumped, found wandering stray, or simply handed in as unwanted come to live in a pen (I don't mean the type with a nib) in the garden of Ink Towers until a new home can be found for them. (They can't actually live inside the house, as that's the territory of my own three cats.)

The charity holds various fundraising events, and it was the annual auction tonight. In a nutshell, this event involves the selling off to the highest bidders of a mountain of kitsch that members of the public have donated. I feel obliged to buy something, but it's normally an almighty struggle to find anything desirable. If I tell you that this evening's offerings included an unused set of bed linen from the 1970s, a statue of a blue-faced dog dressed as a policeman, a Pavarotti pottery figurine, an illuminated umbrella, and a talking Only Fools and Horses mug, you'll get the picture.

As I scanned the list of items upon our arrival, however, lot 46 caught my eye: 'Two Parker fountain pens'. I soon found them in a display cabinet (next to some promotional cufflinks made by the Remington razor company), and identified them as a Duofold and a 45 Flighter. Both were in reasonable condition. I settled back to await the crying of lot 46.

Bidding began at £2, and I raised my arm into the air. Immediately, someone behind me raised the stakes to £4. Another person quickly offered £6, so I jumped in with £8. Before too long, we had reached £20, and I was no longer the highest bidder. The auctioneer looked at me and called '£21?'. I proudly raised my arm. The auctioneer's eyes shifted to the mysterious bidder sitting behind me. I resisted the temptation to turn around and throw my best 'You-don't-know-who-you're-dealing-with-amigo' look in his or her direction. The room was silent. No rival bid was offered. The hammer came down. The pens were mine.

These are the first pens that I've acquired at auction (unless you count eBay, which doesn't have quite the same dramatic appeal), and I can't help feeling that there's something particularly resonant about tonight's event. As I may have mentioned to you in the past, dear readers, the pen that began the strange obsession charted in this blog was a Parker 61 that my grandfather, an auctioneer, left to me when he died in 1974. I was only three years of age at the time, so I didn't have much use for such an item, but my grandmother later told me that he wanted the pen to accompany me to university (I don't know how he knew that I would go; no one in our family had ever been until I went). It did just that, but, more importantly, it also inaugurated the Ink Quest.

I have very few memories of my grandfather, but I always think of him as an auctioneer. (This may be because another one of his possessions, a wooden hammer, also ended up in my hands as a child. I found that much more exciting at the age of three, but I have no idea where it is now.) His lots were usually animals -- I grew up in a rural borderlands town where there has been a regular market since at least the mid-thirteenth century -- and I think that I can just about remember being taken to see him auctioning off a flock of sheep.

All these pieces of the past collided in curious ways this evening: Parker pens, an auction, the sound of a wooden hammer falling, animals. It was a slightly uncanny event. And history truly flooded out when I got home and opened up the pens, for they still contained the ink used by their previous owner. (I think that both pens came from the same source because the shade of ink was identical.) The unmistakably vintage smell and colour of the ink, and the way in which it had solidified in certain places, led me to think that it had been there for quite some time. It washed away eventually, however, and the pens are now drying. When they're ready, I'll introduce them to their new companions. In fact, I think that I'll sit them next to my grandfather's Parker 61. They can relax now -- they've been rehomed.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Private Reserve Tanzanite.

Writing History

Ink follows me wherever I go.

When I sat down on the train back to Ink Towers this evening, I wasn't really thinking about writing instruments. It had been a long, extremely dull day at work, and I simply wanted to sit quietly in the carriage and start the book that I'd picked up from the library this afternoon. Sarah Kofman's Rue Orderner, Rue Labat is a short memoir that narrates the author's life from July 1942, when her father was taken from the family home in occupied Paris and sent to Auschwitz, up until the moment in the 1950s when she began her studies at the Sorbonne. To my surprise, the book begins in the following manner:

Of him all I have left is the fountain pen. I took it one day from my mother's purse, where she kept it along with some other souvenirs of my father. It is a kind of pen no longer made, the kind you have to fill with ink. I used it all through school. It 'failed' me before I could bring myself to give it up. I still have it, patched up with Scotch tape; it is right in front of me on my desk and makes me write, write.

It makes perfect sense to remember someone in terms of his or her possessions, of course -- people do it all the time. But the unexpected encounter with a reference to a fountain pen and ink in Kofman's book prompted me to wonder how on earth I might be remembered through my modest collection. Because the Ink Quest is endless, and because I can't stop buying new pens to go with the bottles, there's no one colour of ink or model of pen that is uniquely 'me'. (Yes, I know what you're also thinking, dear readers: how could an object ever be elegant, charming, witty, and magnetic enough ever to represent the author of your favourite blog?) One of Roland Barthes' former students, Antoine Compagnon, writes somewhere about how the mere sight of the blue ink that his master always used opens the floodgates of memory in an instant. But I don't have 'my' particular colour; I have thirty-something of them. I have, in amassing so many shades of ink and shapes of pen, made myself entirely forgettable. I have blotted myself out of history.

Inks in use today: Diamine Dark Brown; Noodler's Sequoia.

PS: You may remember, dear readers, that the Medinkette, the Inkette's youngest sister who is training to be a doctor, made a recent appearance in Ink Quest. It's her twenty-first birthday tomorrow, and she's a regular reader of my deathless prose (she's much more loyal than the Inkette, in fact), so I shall take this opportunity to wish her a happy birthday. When you open your present from us, dear Medinkette, just remember that I wanted to buy you a spectacular fountain pen and some special ink (I heard all about how your ballpoint ran out in the middle of a lecture recently). My brilliant idea was, alas, rejected at committee level by the Inkette.

The Inkvisible Man

I've always been drawn to the dream of invisibility.

I don't mean literal invisibility; I'm thinking, rather, of the possibility of withdrawing completely from the world and remaining beyond its reach, its puzzling demands. My longstanding interest in this subject was revitalised earlier in the year when the Ink Quest took me to Belgium (see the entries from 30 March and 3 April). As I walked back to my hotel through the pleasant streets of Ghent one evening, it suddenly struck me that I was surrounded by a culture and a language that I could not understand. For some reason, I didn't find this uncomfortable in any way; on the contrary, I felt strangely liberated, happy that the world had no claim upon me. Its signs and spaces brushed past me. In short, I felt invisible.

This was an illusion, of course; while I slipped merrily through the fingers of Belgian culture, my own hadn't loosened its grip on me for one moment. Total withdrawal from the world is probably impossible (unless you want to opt for death or psychosis, and I'd rather not, if that's okay with you). Thoreau famously tried to become invisible in that sense, but Walden also records how its author is constantly disturbed by signs of society.

Having made that confession, let me contradict myself somewhat (if it's good enough for Walt Whitman...). I always look forward to the arrival of the post, messages from the outside world, and Sunday's lack of delivery makes it undoubtedly the most boring day of the week. There's something absurdly exciting about hearing the letterbox open and envelopes fall to the floor. (I know, I know, dear readers -- I really ought to cut down on these wild thrill-seeking activities.) The arrival of post in work, however, complicates matters a little: there's no letterbox to trigger a Pavlovian response, but we do get two or three deliveries per day. My office is at the other end of the building from the mail room, but this doesn't stop me skipping down to the pigeonholes at least ten times an hour.

Imagine my joy, then, dear readers, when I spotted earlier this week a small cream-coloured envelope in my slot. My name was written on the front in beautiful handwriting and an even more heavenly shade of brown ink. I didn't recognize the writing, though, and the return address on the back meant nothing to me. Curious, I opened the envelope ... and discovered a letter from a regular reader of Ink Quest (let's call him Gerry, shall we, dear readers?). Having read about my search for the Great Brown Whale that goes by the name of Omas Sepia, he had decided to send me a note written in that very ink (and on exquisite paper, I might add).

This is now the second time that a kind reader of Ink Quest has sent me a sample of the elusive, Grail-like shade. And I was once again stunned at how magical Omas Sepia really is -- I haven't seen another brown that comes close. Gerry's letter went on to ask a question, and I thought that I'd reproduce and answer it here: 'Do you', he asked, 'have a pen which is the Grail equivalent of Omas Sepia?' I've been thinking about this for a couple of days, and the answer is probably 'no'. Yes, there are plenty of pens that I lust after, but ink is what really keeps me awake at night, keeps me wandering around strange cities and websites, keeps me going.

Thank you, dear reader, for your kind act. (Strangely, French uses the same word, sympathique, to mean both 'kind' and ink that is 'invisible'.) The Great Brown Whale is on my desk ... and yet still invisible.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Sequoia. (I think that I'm addicted to this colour.)

Inkpeachment

When did lipstick become more important than ink?

I've been rereading Marjorie Garber's brilliant Quotation Marks recently (Garber is a true heroine of mine), and I've just finished the chapter on the Monica Lewinsky affair. I took a close interest in the scandal at the time, as I'd been living in California when Clinton first came to power, and I had vivid memories of seeing up close for the first time an American electoral campaign and the subsequent change of national mood. But Garber points out something that I don't remember noticing during the impeachment hearings in the late 1990s: Lewinsky wrote notes to Clinton in a distinctive purple ink. John Updike even mentioned this in a poem published in The New Yorker:

Oh Monica, you Monica
In your little black beret,
You vamped him with your lingo,
Your notes in purple ink,
And fed him "Vox" and bagels
Until he couldn't think.

Quotation Marks doesn't reveal the brand favoured by Monica, and an internet search this morning has failed to solve the mystery. (I did, however, stumble across a fascinating official government document -- an extract from which is pictured above -- that records how samples of Lewinsky's handwriting were taken by the FBI. The poor woman -- they made her use such vile pens. How her purple heart must have ached.)

Garber goes on to note, however, something curious that happened after Barbara Walters interviewed Lewinsky for the ABC television channel in March 1999. 48.5 million people watched the show, and most of the queries logged on the ABC website that night were about the shade of lipstick that Monica had been wearing. As soon as Good Morning America announced that Lewinsky's lips had been adorned with Club Monaco's 'Glaze', the colour enjoyed a remarkable surge in popularity. So much so, in fact, that it 'literally sold out everywhere in New York', according to Good Morning America's Charles Gibson.

It says a lot about the widespread ignorance of real ink (and not just in the USA), I believe, that 'Glaze' lipstick, Nicholson Baker's Vox, and a certain blue dress sold by Gap were all catapulted into the limelight by the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, but that Monica's ink was not. I can't believe that the makers of the latter didn't jump onto the bandwagon, in fact. A huge publicity campaign could have been launched, and American shoppers could have been invited to write like 'Inky Lewinsky', the most famous inktern of all. (It's such a shame that the 's' in her surname breaks up 'ink'. And her first name just needs an 'n' after the 'i', of course.) Close, but no cigar, you might say.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Sequoia (a wonderful, enigmatic colour that hovers seductively between green, black, and dark grey).

Ink -- You Can Never Have Un Oeuf

Finally, a reason to look forward to going to work.

After the sheer hell of last week, I decided to cheer myself up by ordering a bottle of Noodler's Sequoia from those wonderful people at The Writing Desk, and I've just been notified that the package was posted on Saturday. Because I planned ahead and asked for the ink to be delivered to my work address, I can now sit in my office tomorrow and wait for the precious cargo to arrive. I know that there are about fifteen things on my desk that require urgent attention, and I know that it's going to be a long and difficult day, but the prospect of the Sequoia's arriving cancels out such trivial, earthly distractions. I am just about to empty and clean my Stipula I Castoni, which will travel into work without ink so that it can be filled with the new acquisition as soon as it appears.

In fact, I've decided that I want to come into work every morning to a selection of seven new inks, from which I will make my choice for the day. Why seven? Well, it emerged last week that Prince Charles (they'll have to drag me to the Tower and torture me with ballpoints before I call him the Prince of Wales) likes to eat a boiled egg after a 'hard' day's hunting. But, according to Jeremy Paxman, whose new book on the royal family is discussed in this Guardian article, because the Prince's servants 'were never quite sure whether the egg would be precisely to the satisfactory hardness, a series of eggs was cooked, and laid out in an ascending row of numbers. If the prince felt that number five was too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven'.

What I want, in other words, is an assistant -- an inktern -- who will have lined up seven bottles on my desk each morning. I will then march in, remove my crown, and dip away until I find something that suits my mood. When I have chosen, the other six shades will be removed and distributed to some of my poor and needy subjects. God save the InKing!

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.