Hallucinkations

The Tibetan Buddhists say that spiritual masters whose students do not become better than them are failures. They do not offer any guidance for the student whose master mumbles inconsistently.

Several hours after posting yesterday's entry about my visions of red, I received an email from the Supreme Master of Mixing, Stefan, who politely pointed out that I had misinterpreted his teachings about ink. Adding Tanzanite to Supershow, he clarified, was a way of neutralizing the green in the latter with the red in the former. In other words, my original lesson at the feet of the wise one should have taught me that Supershow has a green hue, not a red one. But, Stefan went on to say, he had, in the light of my post, just performed an experiment using Tanzanite ink, a paper towel, and water. (This, as ink lovers will know, is a handy way to separate a colour out into its component parts.) And he had been rather shocked to see no trace of red in the Tanzanite. Here, for the record, is how his email ended: 'It is mostly a purple-blue, with traces of a light blue and perhaps even (dare I say it?) green. So it's really the purple that neutralizes the green in the... mumble mumble...'

Those are his actual mumblings, dear readers. What is a disciple to do when he discovers that he has a self-confessed mumbling master? To be fair to the wise one, he did also say in his email that he hadn't actually checked whether or not Supershow contains red, but I simply assumed that his mystical sixth sense was at work during his original pronouncement. (Don't actually check for the colour -- sense its presence, young disciple.)

This crisis has, of course, prompted me to think again about the vision of red that coloured my morning yesterday. Did I really see it in the lines of Supershow Blue, or was it merely a hallucinkation? Do I experience miraculous visions, or am I just delusional?

With these concerns in mind, I have just attempted a Stefan-style experiment with a large dot of Supershow, a paper towel, and a few drops of water. Now, I was constantly told off for not paying attention during Chemistry lessons in school (I fear that I may even, in a moment of high teenage angst, even have asked 'What does this have to do with art?' at one point), so I may have made a rudimentary error in the laboratory this evening. I can, however, discern no sign of red. All I can see, in fact, is, er, blue and a very vague hint of green. Does this mean that the Master was right all along, even if he now doubts his own judgement? And what about the red that I saw? It was there, I tell you. It spoke to me. You can take it as read.

Meanwhile, just to cause even more of a commotion on the deck of the Penquod, a message has arrived from another reader of Ink Quest. Let's call her Noelle, shall we, dear readers? She informs me that I should, if I like the red hue of Supershow Blue, try the legendary Parker Penman Sapphire, and she has generously offered to send a written sample. I have seen this glorious -- if somewhat controversial -- colour on a couple of occasions, but its present scarcity means that it is not one of the bottles stored in the hold of the Penquod. Should I take this message as confirmation that there is, contrary to my experiment and Stefan's original teachings, red in Supershow after all?

I no longer know what to believe. Everything has been thrown open to doubt. My visions are subject to revision. The opening lines of Bob Dylan's 'Visions of Johanna' come to mind:

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it.

I cannot deny it: everywhere I turn lies a red herring.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Sequoia; Omas Sepia.

Redress

I'm seeing red ... and not.

The day began well. I spent the morning in the library, catching up on some administration and preparing for the afternoon's teaching. I chose a seat next to a window and ceremonially unveiled my pens (Black Beauty and Blue Beauty, filled with Noodler's Sequoia and DC Supershow Blue, respectively). I had only written a few words with the latter when the clouds parted, a beam of light fell upon me, and I experienced a moment of miraculous revelation.

As you know, dear readers, I believe DC Supershow to be the perfect blue. It has barely left my side since it arrived at Ink Towers some weeks ago. You may also remember, however, that I recently tried a little experiment. Following a tip from honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, I mixed Supershow with Private Reserve Tanzanite in an attempt to create a truer blue. Stefan's email explained, if I remember correctly, that the Tanzanite would cancel out the red hue in the Supershow. He's a supreme master of mixing, and I'm hopeless with colour combinations, so I took his word for it, and the resulting colour was indeed a flawless, refined, true blue. I couldn't, however, quite understand what he meant about the red element of Supershow. 'How can blue contain red?', I wondered to myself. I believed Stefan, just as I believe him when he says that he's not eating Belgian chocolates from the shop that's conveniently located near his place of work, but I couldn't actually see the red for myself.

Everything changed this morning, however. When the heavenly light shone upon my notes, my blindness was cured. The red suddenly appeared and spoke in celestial tones. And verily it said unto me: 'Behold! I am red -- hear me roar'. And now that my eyes have been opened, I can't not see it in every line of Supershow. I think that it must be the ingredient that draws me to the shade, for the true blue produced by adding Tanzanite -- while true -- didn't keep me in its congregation for more than a couple of days.

Later, after teaching for several hours, I retired to my office to wrestle with yet more of the red tape upon which British universities pride themselves. My main task for the rest of the day was to draw up for the central bureaucrats a timetable for the next academic year. Because they're bureaucrats, they have a rigid system in place for this: they send me the timetable relating to the current year, and I then have to use blue and red ink to make amendments for the coming year. That's the rule; there's no alternative.

Because this activity also involves the use of a 30cm ruler, and because I've found that fountain pens don't take too kindly to being drawn along the edge of such a thing, I always swallow my pride and complete the timetable using ballpoint pen. Yes, I know -- it's a scandal, and it's taken me something like eighteen months of blogging to build up to this monstrous confession. I don't, of course, keep ballpoints in my office, so I always have to borrow two biros from the departmental stationery cupboard. I try to do this when no one is looking, just in case I am caught red-handed and outed as a red-faced Bicophile.

But here's the problem: I have been to the stationery cupboard on three separate occasions today, and on each visit I have managed secretly to grab a blue and a red ballpoint. Why the repetition? I will tell you, dear readers. I managed in all three cases somehow to lose or misplace the pens before I could get back to my office and start my scribbling. It's true that I took a detour on each occasion -- to the post room, the refectory, and to my secretary's office -- but I retraced my steps when I realized my loss, and the pens were nowhere to be found. I have now deferred the entire project until tomorrow.

I clearly have an extremely efficient unconscious. Not only is it capable of threefold thwarting; it can also make ballpoints disappear into thin air and turn a tedious afternoon into a red-letter day.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Sequoia; Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

PS: I fear that the Inkette has wandered from the faith. Today was her first day back in work after a week's holiday, and I have just noticed that she did not take her recently acquired, Supershow-filled fountain pen with her. If you do just one thing this evening, dear readers, say a little prayer for this errant soul.

'X' Marks the Spot ... Briefly

The Anti-Midas touch has struck again, dear readers.

As I have reported in previous posts, I have a rather unfortunate gift: everything that I touch with the best intentions somehow quickly descends into total disaster. A friend once called this the Anti-Midas touch, and the name has stuck.

Fans of Seinfeld may recall a wonderful episode in which George Costanza -- the living person with whom I most identify -- comes up with a brilliant plan to make life better for the New York Yankees baseball team, by whom he is briefly employed as Assistant to the Travelling Secretary. Having noticed that the players are overheating in their uniforms, George persuades the organization to switch to cotton clothing. This works perfectly for a while, but then the uniforms shrink, leaving the team 'running like penguins', subject to mass ridicule, and unable to play.

George's Anti-Midas touch came to mind this week when I selflessly tried to help a new member of my department. When she reported that she was having difficulty finding one of the university's libraries, I volunteered to draw her a map. It was, I believed, a flawless creation: 'X' marked the spot, and a precise line threaded from our building to the library in question. I used the exceptionally elegant Rohrer and Klingner Alt Bordeaux ink to sketch the route, and I remember being particularly pleased at how pretty the colour looked on the page. I handed over the work of beauty, happy to have helped a fellow human being. It was at about this point that the Anti-Midas touch took hold.

My new colleague set off with the map in her hand and was on her way to her destination when it started to rain. Heavily. Alt Bordeaux ink is not remotely waterproof, of course, and so my map quickly turned into a mess of wine-coloured streaks, leaving its holder wandering helplessly in a torrential downpour. To make matters worse, she told me this evening that she could feel a cold coming on.

Once again, I have managed, while trying to help, to ruin someone's day. I have even thrown illness into the bargain on this occasion. There's a chance that she's too new an employee to claim full sick pay, so she will probably be forced to sell her house and declare herself bankrupt within the month. And all because I insisted on using a stylish shade to mark the route to the library. I actually own several inks that withstand water, bleach, and ammonia, but Alt Bordeaux, alas, is not one of them. I knew that the Anti-Midas touch was dangerous, but this is the first time that I have possibly wiped someone off the map.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Sequoia; Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

Anachroninksm

The devil is in the detail. A carefully formulated project can collapse because of minor, apparently unimportant oversights.

Many of Hitchcock's films teach us this: in Foreign Correspondent, the secret of the windmill is discovered because its sails revolve in the wrong direction; in Dial M for Murder, Tony has mapped out the murder of his wife as if it were a ballet, but is finally brought down by the key to his own door; Rear Window locates the final proof of Thorwald's guilt in the strange presence of a wedding ring; Scottie, the tortured protagonist of Vertigo, learns Judy's secret when she carelessly wears a necklace associated with Madeleine; and in Psycho, suspicion falls upon Norman Bates because of a signature in the motel register and a minuscule scrap of paper in the toilet.

The importance of detail struck me today as we wandered around a rather wonderful vintage clothing fair in Cardiff City Hall. Within the neoclassical splendour of this lovely building (pictured above), something like forty different stalls were amassed, all selling elegant clothing and accessories from, roughly speaking, the first five or six decades of the twentieth century. It was quite difficult to browse properly, as Cardiff seems to have a large vintage/burlesque community which had remained a secret to me until this morning. One woman looked as if she'd stepped from an Edward Hopper painting, while across the room a man wore a trilby with a poise not seen since Sinatra sang for the swinging lovers.

It would have been possible to assemble an entire vintage look from the stalls this morning. I've always been quite drawn to such an idea, and I've often wished that ours was a moment in which men still wore hats. Not baseball hats or those ugly woollen things that uncouth teenagers wear; I'm talking proper hats -- the kind that might be worn in a film like The Asphalt Jungle. I tip my hat to any man who steps out in a trilby in 2007, but it's a step that I just can't quite take. First, I have an absurdly large head. Second, I just know that, although trying to look like Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley, I'd resemble the bear from the old Hofmeister advert.

There was, however, a fatal flaw with today's event: I scoured every stall, but not one sold fountain pens. I realize, of course, that there are special fairs for pen lovers, but the stalls in City Hall offered every possible vintage accessory except fountain pens. In addition to standard items of clothing, I saw cufflinks, wallets, handbags, grooming kits, scarves, shirt studs, jewellery, magazines, sheet music, and shoes, but not one nib. I can only assume, then, that South Wales is filled with elegantly retro-attired men and women who open their velvet jackets or beaded evening bags to reveal plastic ballpoint pens. I realize, of course, that these vile instruments existed in the middle of the last century, but they had yet to become the all-conquering monstrosities of the present moment. Why go to so much effort to recreate the past, only to ruin the look with a biro?

It's clear, then, what I will have to do if the fair returns next year. Come rain or come shine, I shall set up my own stall outside City Hall. It will sell vintage fountain pens and inks beneath a large sign that will read: 'Forgotten something? Put your look write'. I will be the altruistic figure who adds the finishing touch to every retro outfit. In the nib of time, I will save wandering souls from the sin of anachroninksm.

Ink in use today: Diamine Grey (suitably vintage in appearance, I feel).

Inkfectious

The Penquod has a new and unlikely recruit.

As regular readers of Ink Quest will know, the other human resident of Ink Towers, the Inkette, has always been deeply sceptical about my pursuit of the perfect ink and my love of a good fountain pen. Among her most used phrases are: 'What do you geeks find to talk about all the time?' (used when I am found browsing The Fountain Pen Network), 'Another letter from someone who just wants to show you what an ink looks like?', 'Are we only going on a daytrip there because there's a fountain pen shop nearby?', and 'Can you please get out of the bathroom and take your inks with you; I would like to have one of my deep and luxurious baths that overflows and rots the wood surround'.

Imagine my suprise, then, when she casually remarked, a week or so ago, that she would 'quite like' her own fountain pen. And imagine my total shock when she added that she 'wouldn't mind' filling it with Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

I only needed to hear this once. After saying a quick (secular) prayer to the (secular) God of Ink, I dashed into the city and bought her a red Lamy Safari. (This was not really an act of pure generosity, of course; if I hadn't done this, any one of my precious pens could have been kidnapped.) This was then filled with Supershow Blue and presented to her just before she left for work on Wednesday morning. She has reported that writing has been particularly pleasurable this week, but I have a feeling that she might be getting tired of the hourly 'How's the pen?' text messages currently emanating from Ink Towers.

One good romantic gesture deserves another, of course, and so I now find that my desk is adorned with two -- yes, two -- glorious new inkwells (pictured above) that the Inkette managed to find in an antique/reclamation outlet not too far from here. I have yet to use them, but I've been staring at them constantly while writing and typing today. The latter activity has been transformed into a particularly joyful ritual this week, in fact, for I have just acquired Windsor Light, the typeface that Woody Allen uses in the credits for most of his films. The transition from ink to type is no longer quite so traumatic, quite so disappointing, for every typed word now looks urbane, witty, and as majestic as the Manhattan skyline. (You should see the ampersands; their flamboyance would put Liberace to shame.) When printed out, and for reasons that I have not yet determined, Windsor Light goes particularly well with Rohrer and Klinger Alt Bordeaux ink, as you can see from the photograph above. (I'm not going to invite you to guess what my scrawl might say this time, dear readers.) I have yet to try Woody's favourite type with Noodler's Manhattan Blue, but I suspect that this would be a match made in heaven.

Meanwhile, a new ink has caught my eye. You may remember that I wrote some months ago about how my longtime and special friendship with a character who goes by the pseudonym of Eileen had been elevated to a new level when we discovered, some twelve years into our friendship, that we both love fountain pens. We've been sharing and feeding obsessions ever since, and Eileen seems to have bought a new pen every time she emails or writes. Anyway, I received a post card from her this morning, on which she proudly showed off her new Pelikan italic nib and her recently acquired bottle of Private Reserve Black Cherry. Until today I'd always thought that the latter is too close to Noodler's Nightshade to warrant a purchase, but I was so, so wrong. I know that I've said this every time I've been swept off my feet, but I really think that this might be The One. It's so pretty, so subtle, so edible! The only problem is that I've bought far too much ink in recent months, and I'm genuinely beginning to forget what I have in my ink box.

I have a plan: if I were to give the Inkette my DC Supershow Blue, I'd be one bottle down. (It could still live in my ink box, and I could still use it regularly, but it would legally be the property of the Inkette.) This would mean that buying a new colour would not actually be increasing my holdings. I'd be doing nothing, in other words. Yes, it could be an invisible ink.

Inks in use today: Rohrer and Klingner Alt Bordeaux; Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

'I'm With You in Rockland'

Allen Ginsberg wanted to talk to me about fountain pens.

In the dream I had last night, that is. I'd been flicking through the Collected Poems before going to sleep (I know how to live on a Saturday night), and he was clearly still on my mind. I did actually meet him once, in San Jose in September 1992. He signed my copy of Kaddish (see above), asked me, when he heard my accent, what the hell I was doing in California, and then told me about visiting Wales and taking acid at Tintern Abbey. In my dream, though, we were in Berkeley, in Cody's Books on 4th Street. He came up to me and started to tell me about how he wished that he'd written Howl with a fountain pen and some 'visionary ink', as he put it. Because he'd used a typewriter, he continued, the lines hadn't been as free and flowing as they might have been. (I have no idea, inkidentally, if Howl really was composed on a typewriter; my unconscious may have been thinking of Kerouac's On the Road.) 'The people might have been truly set free if only I'd used a fountain pen', he lamented.

While Ginsberg remains a hero, I think that the people have become a little too free these days. Allow me to give you an example. I had to drive across Cardiff yesterday morning on my way to the vet's surgery to collect some of the special food that one of the cats has to eat. As I grazed the edge of Splott (yes, dear readers unfamiliar with Cardiff, there really is an area called Splott; rumour has it that it's pronounced to rhyme with 'flow' in the more gentrified streets), I saw a man coming out of his house, evidently on his way to buy something like a newspaper or a pint of milk from the shop a little further down the street. He had clearly just got out of bed. In fact, he was still wearing his night clothes -- a crumpled t-shirt and a pair of shorts -- and had slippers on his feet.

When did this kind of behaviour become acceptable? What happened to decorum? How on earth have we reached a point where someone could think that he or she does not need to be properly dressed and groomed before crossing the threshold? I'm sure that this man's actions would have been unthinkable in the rule-bound Britain of the first half of the twentieth century. My grandmother, for instance, who was born in 1906, believed, even though she was not particularly religious, that hanging washing out to dry on the Sabbath was simply wrong, as was a man not walking kerb-side when out strolling with a female acquaintance. And I can remember a friend's grandmother, who must have been about the same age, once acidly declaring that any woman still in her dressing gown after 10am was 'evidently a harlot'.

Now, I don't agree with these particular rules, but I do think that we've gone too far in the direction of individualistic freedom. As one of Cole Porter's finest moments has it: 'When grandmama whose age is eighty / In night clubs is getting matey / With gigolos / Anything goes.' Absolutely anything goes these days, it seems, and people believe that it's their right to do whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it, and wherever they feel like it. Litter must be dropped in the street -- it says so in the European Charter of Human Rights. Mobile phones must be answered in the library -- it might be important. Disabled parking spaces must be filled with cars belonging to the able-bodied -- that's why we pay road tax and petrol duty. Children must be encouraged to shout obscenities on public transport and kick other passengers -- they're little individuals with opinions to share. Punctuation and grammar are irrelevant -- Il'l expres's; myself how what I, feel.

You probably won't be surprised, dear readers, to learn that I relate this sorry state of affairs to the reign of the ballpoint and the concurrent demise of the fountain pen. Ginsberg was wrong to suggest in my dream that the latter is somehow linked to unlimited freedom; I see it, rather, as part of a lost world of etiquette, restraint, and decency. When we hand our children biros and tell them to express themselves as they see fit, we're giving them an instrument that is cheap, disposable, and ugly. Why would anyone care about what happens to or with a ballpoint? Can you imagine tears being spilled over a lost or broken biro? Of course not. You would just spend 30p to get a new one. A fountain pen, on the other hand, requires special care and attention. It needs to be looked after, handled gently. Every word that comes from an inked nib is weighed. Any animalistic urges to scribble madly or stab at the page must be reigned in, too, for the tines are delicate. When changing inks, the pen must be ceremonially bathed and wrapped in swaddling-clothes to dry. These things take time. There are rules.

I can't imagine, then, a dedicated user of fountain pens ever believing that he or she could just pop across the road in night clothes and slippers to buy a newspaper. I, for one, never step out of Ink Towers without waxing my moustache, starching my shirt, polishing my shoes, shaving twice with a cut-throat razor and luxurious foam, and affixing my monocle. I want the rules back! I want a renaissance of old-fashioned British repression! I realize that I'm fighting a battle that cannot possibly be won, of course, but I'm prepared to howl all the way to Rockland.

Ink in use today: Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

Snowhere

I'm going nowhere.

Snow is falling all around Ink Towers, as you can see from the two photographs above. The cats are extremely confused; only one of them has ventured outside, but he soon came running back in, his thick fur filled with flakes. I had planned, while taking a break from the marking the last few essays, to walk into town for an espresso and something shockingly bad for my waistline, but yesterday's adventures on ice are still fresh in my memory, so I'm staying put. How do other people manage to walk so quickly and easily when there's snow underfoot? Why was I the only one behaving like a baby giraffe as I struggled to make it from the railway station to the university?

Because I'm under siege, I have been experimenting in the lab with Stefan's suggestion for improving the colour of DC Supershow Blue. 'How do you improve an ink that's already perfect?', I hear you cry. Well, here's what you do: you create a mix of five parts Supershow to three parts Private Reserve Tanzanite. The result is a blue that's a bit darker than Supershow, but that feels somehow more pure. As pure as the driven snow, perhaps. I am now going to mark the last few essays with this glorious new colour. Do my students realize what meticulous planning goes into the grading process? Should I add a little 'Ink in use today' category to the standardized feedback sheets that we use?

I did, of course, manage to get ink all over my fingers while working in the lab. This is, no doubt, an effect of the same clumsiness that thwarted my walk to work yesterday morning. My hands are blue, in other words, but at least it has nothing to do with the cold.

Ink in use today: Private Reserve DC Supershow/Tanzanite mix.

And the Answer is...

humanism

The Letter of the Day is 'h'

And still they try to crack the DaVinki Code (a brilliant pun that I have shamelessly stolen from honorary crew member Stefan). 'Liars' or 'hiero', they cry. 'Afraid not', I respond.

How long should I keep you waiting? Maybe you need a clue. Yes, a clue: it begins with 'h'.

Inks in use today: Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon, Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue, Visconti Sepia.

Eninkma

There's nothing like a little competition to get things going, is there?

Ink Quest normally receives around thirty visitors a day. By 9.30pm today, however, fifty people had visited the site. Some of them have been brought here by a mention of the Quiz of the Century on Chimpomatic; others have come directly here and then returned on several occasions, presumably having another crack at the code.

I've also received more bold suggestions -- mailer, this, heirs, inaction, and maison, for instance -- but no one has yet come anywhere the truth of the scrawl. And with the suggestions have come some curious confessions. One friend, who used to be a big fan of Lamy Safari fountain pens (I can even remember scouring the stationery shops of Exeter with him for Lamy cartridges in about 1991), revealed that he had also suffered from accusations of illegibility in his school days. Another friend quietly announced that his handwriting -- which is perfectly clear -- had been meticulously modelled on that of Sinead O'Connor at a point in his life when had a teenage crush on her.

While you carry on working on the enigmatic code, dear readers, I'm rethinking my proposal to move to China or Japan, for there may be an alternative. I've now learned from Fischer's A History of Writing that Rotokas, which is spoken in the Solomon Islands, has just eleven letters. If I can't manage the twenty-six letters that make up modern English, perhaps I could at least become moderately proficient in the language with the smallest alphabet in the world. (I think, inkidentally, that I ought to avoid Khmer, which has seventy-four letters.) Once again, the universe has wronged me: I could have been able to communicate if I'd been born in the Solomon Islands. I could have been readable in Rotokas. I could have been a contender.

The Unbroken Code

Several dedicated cryptographists (well, readers of Ink Quest with my email address and too much free time on their hands, to be more precise) have tried to decipher the scribble displayed with the previous post. They have suggested, among other things: herr, liaison, Louis, and Heinz. No, no, no, and no. Keep guessing, dear readers!

Inks in use today: Visconti Sepia; Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

Scrawl Or Nothing At All

I should probably move to China or Japan.

While I love ink and fountain pens, I've struggled all my life to make my handwriting legible. In junior school, for instance, I was made to take special lessons in an attempt to improve my unruly scribble. I remember being made to practise the letter 's' for a whole hour. It clearly did no good, as I still write the letter in question (along with g, j, and the letters 3, 5, and 6) from the bottom upwards, which, I understand, contravenes most people's idea of common sense. The rest of my alphabet is decidedly vague, too. At a conference a year or two ago, in fact, a stranger sitting next to me actually leaned over and asked, in all seriousness, 'Are you writing in hieroglyphics?' And one of the secretaries in work once told me that I have the second most unreadable handwriting in the department. You should see the scrawl of the distinguished professor who beat me...

My teachers probably had a point, though. There are times when even I can't read what I've written. Today, for example, I retrieved some notes from my filing cabinet in preparation for a seminar, only to discover that the handwritten note I'd attached twelve months ago was completely indecipherable. To make matters worse, the presence of a big asterisk at the top of the note suggested that it was something rather important. Alternatively, look at the picture above, which is a close up of one word from my notebook. Any guesses? I know what it says, but I'm not sure that anyone else could crack the code. I will post the answer in a day or two...

But there might be hope for me. Travelling home on the train this evening, I came across the following passage in Steven Roger Fischer's brilliant and fascinating A History of Writing:

Contrary to Western notions of calligraphy, whereby legibility precedes aesthetics, in both China and Japan aesthetics precedes legibility. (This obtains to such a degree that a cultured person in these societies might even be insulted if told her or his handwriting were 'clearly legible'.)

It's clear, then: I could be a god among calligraphers in Japan or China. (I might choose the latter, actually, as Fischer goes on to say that Japanese is probably the most complex writing system in existence. If I'm going to become a deity, I'll choose the least strenuous route, thank you very much.) In the picture above, my scrawl has happily abandoned legibility for aesthetics, and it evidently has no interest in returning to the fold of the readable. (I do think that it's a beautiful scribble, even if no one can actually make sense of it. And beauty, of course, lies at the root of the word 'calligraphy'.) Come to think of it, my handwriting has probably slipped further into illegibility ever since I took a real interest in the trappings of ink and fountain pens. My interest in their beauty, their aesthetic value, that is to say, has clearly rubbed off on my writing, which has become a mystical form of art.

Inks in use today: Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue; Levenger Cocoa.

Blue Rinse

Is this going to wash with you, dear readers?

Because I love my new Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue ink so much, I have decided, as the photograph above shows, to give it a bath. It's part of the family, after all. But does this mean that I am now in too deep? Should the plug be pulled on Ink Quest in the interests of sanity?

I have, inkidentally, received a thrilling tip from Stefan, one of the honorary members of the crew of the Penquod. He's passed on a suggestion about adding Private Reserve Tanzanite to DC Supershow in order to make a colour that's even more stunning. I'm desperate to try this out, to see if it makes a bigger splash, and I will report at length as soon as I have had chance, but I have a pile of students' essays to mark by the end of the day. I shouldn't even be writing this, in fact, but I feel that a short break for espresso, cinnamon danish, and blogging is acceptable once in a blue moon.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Brown (joyfully rediscovered in a vial sent to me a while back); Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

Inksomnia

It's keeping me awake.

The DC Supershow Blue ink, that is. I awoke at about 4am today, and I soon realized that I was not going to be able to get back to sleep. I tried my usual trick of listening to BBC World Service radio on headphones, but it did no good. And I soon also realized that I had been dreaming about how perfect my new blue ink is. I must have been jolted out of slumber by a sense of wild happiness. My unconscious must have decided to launch me back to the real world, where I would be able to scribble joyfully with the subject of my reverie.

I crept downstairs and sat on the sofa with a quadruple espresso and some toast. This rather two of my cats, who had been curled up asleep in the lounge. They came over to sniff and purr with puzzled looks upon their faces, as if their whole world had been turned upside down by my rising several hours earlier than usual. Because I was not yet awake enough to read -- although the caffeine did change things quite quickly -- I decided to watch the last part of Radio On, a brilliant and tragically overlooked British film that I've had on loan for far too long from a friend (let's call him Arty, shall we, dear readers?). The early Hitchcock and Brief Encounter aside, I'm not normally a fan of much British cinema, but Radio On is something special. It's a black-and-white road movie that was made in 1979 (IMDb gives a release date of 1980, though) by Chris Petit, who was clearly under the spell of the early films of Wim Wenders. It tells the tale of a young man who drives from London to Bristol in order to find out more about the death of his brother. There's not much dialogue -- when the barely sketched characters do speak, they often mumble, pause for eternities, or even lapse into German (for which the film offers no subtitles) -- and the ending doesn't really resolve anything. What really makes the film for me is the cinematography. It's beautifully harsh: the cities look like they've stepped from a film noir, and even daylight looks like the small hours.

As I sat watching this morning, I had a rather strange Proustian experience. When the central character arrives in Bristol, there are various moody shots of the city. We used to go on family outings to Bristol in the 1970s, but I had completely forgotten what the place looked like at the time. This is probably because I really got to know Bristol when I lived a short drive away in Bath between 1995 and 2003. My childhood memories had, that is to say, been replaced by more accurate impressions from my adult life. This morning, however, I found myself for the first time in over twenty years looking at and thinking about the extremely unusual flyover that used to rise above Victoria Street and wind past the old Grosvenor Hotel (of which there's a spectacular Hopper-esque shot in the film). I have no idea when the flyover was demolished, but I'm almost entirely sure that it wasn't there when I moved to Bath in my mid-twenties. As soon as I saw the odd construction on the screen today, I felt as if I'd been transported across a forgotten bridge to my childhood. I could even smell the interior of the bright orange Russian Lada that masqueraded, to much public amusement, as our family car at the time. (Yes, at the height of punk, we were cruising the mean streets of South Wales in a squat, noisy tank whose dials were all in Cyrillic script. It sound archly avant-garde now, but that's not how it felt at the time.)

This unexpected flashback would have been strange at any time, but it was made even more unsettling by the fact that it was 4.30am and I had already eaten my breakfast. I'm beginning to wonder if any of it really happened, in fact. Perhaps the DC Supershow Blue wins its fans by interfering with their brain patterns. I've often said that I'm addicted to ink, but have I now fallen under the spell of something truly mind-altering? I can't help noticing that the letters 'D’ and 'C' both occur, and in that order, in the surname of Philip K. Dick, who wrote numerous stories about bizarre drugs that opened the door to alternative realities. Does Supershow gives its users a 'super show' of hallucinated spectacles? Does DC make people dizzy? Is my inksomnia merely the beginning?

Ink in use today: Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

Blue. Period.

Well, that was easy.

As you know, dear readers, the Penquod has recently deviated from its usual hunt for brown inks to search for the perfect blue. I was expecting this to take years, perhaps even to be as endless as the quest for the perfect brown. I thought that the bottle of Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue ordered last weekend would be merely the first step of many. But it seems that I was wrong.

The new acquisition arrived in work yesterday. Foolishly, I had forgotten to bring an empty pen with me, so I had to wait until the evening to try out the goods. As soon as the ink emerged from the nib of Blue Beauty, I knew that I had captured the Great Blue Whale, the perfect blue. I've been using Omas Blue a lot recently, and I'd begun to wonder if things could get any better than that, but DC Supershow Blue takes things to a new level. It's vivid, confident, flows beautifully, and offers some wonderful shading. In short, it's perfect.

Is that it, though? Can the search for the ideal blue really be so quick and easy? What happened to the weeks of pursuit, empty promises, and repeated disappointment that have always made up the ongoing quest for the perfect brown? I can't help feeling disappointed that I'm not disappointed with my new ink. There must be something wrong with it.

No, I've just written a few more lines in DC Supershow, and it still strikes me as perfect. Maybe perfect is the problem, though. I'm reminded at this point of a brilliant scene (tautology, I know) in an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry loses interest in a woman named Lena because, in short, she's too nice:

JERRY: I mean, she's giving and caring and genuinely concerned about the welfare of others -- I can't be with someone like that!

GEORGE: I see what you mean.

JERRY: I mean, I admire the hell out of her. You can't have sex with someone you admire.

GEORGE: Where's the depravity?

JERRY: No depravity!

Now, I'm not suggesting that I want depravity from my inks. But perhaps I don't want perfection. Perhaps, as I believe I've discussed previously, I enjoy the quest more than the conquest. Finding perfection means that the hunt is over, that the Penquod has to return to the harbour. And what's the point of having a ship as fine as this one if you keep it moored at all times?

My 'blue period' (Picasso had one, so why can't I?) is over, then. It ended, disappointingly, in perfection. But this is not the end. Let us be happy that the world is still full of imperfection, broken dreams, misery, and unfulfilled desires.

Inks in use today: Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue; Noodler's Walnut.