Coming Attraction

I bet Hitchcock never went through this.

It was my plan this morning to take advantage of Blogger's new facility for uploading video clips, dear readers, and present you with an exclusive preview of the opening scene from Ink Quest: The Movie. (Coming to a multiplex near you soon.) I haven't been able to get the video to work via Blogger, however, so I've had to resort to other means. I apologize to any Ink Quest readers who tried to view the clip earlier this morning and saw only a blank space. You should now be able to see the footage below.

The sequence could perhaps be read as a tribute to the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien, but I have decided to leave the Maoist denunciation of the destructive and alienating spirit of modern capitalism on the floor of the cutting room. (I need to shop for ink, after all.)

We're still casting the film, so I can't give you a complete list of dramatis personae yet, but I can reveal that we have approached Pen Affleck, Nib Nolte, Parker '51' Posey, Sam Inkwell, Patrick 'Conway' Stewart, Matt Montblanc, and, on the strength of his performance in Noodler's Zhivago, Omas Sharif. We're hoping, too, that Shirley Bassey, who grew up just a mile or two from Ink Towers, can be persuaded to record a new version of her Bond classic under the title 'Diamines are Forever'. Failing that, we'll be contacting Lamy Winehouse ('They tried to make me write with a biro,/I said no, no no.')

Ink Quest: The Movie -- for your consideration.



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

His Story

I've had a strange adventure. I do not know which of us has written this page.

I went to see my parents in what the Inkette and I affectionately call Del Boca Vista yesterday afternoon. Even though I moved out of the family home and took all of my possessions with me many years ago, every return visit involves my being presented with yet another object from my past that they've found in a drawer, a cupboard, or the attic. Yesterday it was a sheet of paper featuring a short story that I'd written in junior school. The tale was not dated, so I can't be precise about its age, but my guess is that it was produced at some point between 1979 and 1981, when I would have been eight to ten years of age.

The title of my thrilling one-page yarn was 'The Severn Bridge Adventure', and I have a feeling that it was written as part of a creative writing exercise in which we were given the last line of the story -- 'And all because I had used my eyes and ears' -- and told to describe the events leading up to it. My fertile, Hitchcockian mind came up with a picaresque tale in which I spotted an escaped criminal in the Aust motorway service station, which used to lie just across the bridge, on the English side. (There is still a service station there, but the entire site was renamed and radically designed a few years ago.) Strolling casually past him as he used the payphone, I heard him refer to stolen jewels that had been hidden beneath a shrub in a park. When he had finished using the phone, I dialled 999, and the police soon arrived to capture the thief. I was, as a reward, invited to police headquarters some weeks later 'to see an exhibition'. And all because I had used my eyes and ears.

Many things struck me as I read the story. I had, for instance, included some bizarrely specific details, such as the fact that the Severn Bridge was 28 miles from my house, that the criminal's voice was 'virtually inaudible' (I'd clearly been flicking through the dictionary that day), and that the toll to cross the bridge was 20p. (This latter piece of information could probably be used to date my story more precisely. There must be a blog devoted to the changing prices of the Severn Bridge toll booths, surely. 20p seems laughably cheap to modern eyes -- it costs £5.10 to enter Wales these days, although in the late 1970s and early 1980s the tolls applied in both directions -- but I have no doubt that I had obsessively remembered this fact for use in my story, not knowing that it would one day hold the key to crucial historical research, just as the pink hotpants worn by Miss Torso in Hitchcock's Rear Window made possible the accurate restoration of the film to its original colour several decades later.)

The many references to 'the Severn Bridge' scattered throughout the piece made me nostalgic for simpler times. These days, a reference to 'the Severn Bridge' would probably provoke 'Which one?' in response, for a second bridge (officially called the Second Severn Crossing) was opened in the mid-1990s. It now carries most of the traffic from Wales to England, so the original bridge -- which opened in late 1966, and which I regularly make a point of still using -- has become somewhat neglected, forgotten, uncrossed. (Fans of Bob Dylan will, of course, always remember the original bridge as the construction that lurks unfinished in the upper right-hand corner of the iconic mid-1966 picture of Dylan waiting to cross the Severn on the old Aust ferry.)

Above all, I was appalled to see that I had written the story in ballpoint pen. I know, and I believe that Ink Quest has previously mentioned, that I regularly used a Parker 25 fountain pen in junior school. Why, then, had I used a monstrous biro on the day in question? Had I forgotten to take my fountain pen to school? Had it been confiscated by the teacher because it had, yet again, leaked? Or -- the horror! -- did my younger self make no distinction in his head between different types of writing instrument? Was it all the same to me as long as words emerged?

But did I even write the story? I ask this more troubling question for several reasons. First, I have no proper memory of its creation. I think that we were given the final line of the piece and asked to write the rest of the story, but I might be remembering another exercise. Second, there is no name on the piece of paper. Weren't we always told to put the date and our names at the top of every assignment? Third, the handwriting looks nothing like my present scrawl.

It's perfectly common for a person's writing to change as he or she ages, of course, but, apart from the angle of the horizontal in the capital 'T', I can see no trace whatever of my current way of shaping letters in the lines inscribed upon the historical document. So that you can see exactly what I mean, I have posted two pictures above: the first shows how the title is written at the top of the original sheet from 1979-1981, and the second depicts -- this time in proper ink -- those same words penned yesterday evening.

I see nothing of myself in the earlier script. It's not writing that I'd ever identify as mine. The person who held the pen that created 'The Severn Bridge Adventure' was not me. And I don't mean that in the way that Jacques Derrida does when, in Limited Inc, he describes how a person who writes himself or herself a shopping list is not quite the same as the person who reads that list some time later in the supermarket. 'The sender of the shopping list', he notes, 'is not the same as the receiver, even if they bear the same name and are endowed with the identity of a single ego. ... Why would I bother about a shopping list if the presence of sender to receiver were so certain?' I write a shopping list, in other words, precisely because I know that something about me will have changed by the time I get to the shop.

Derrida's point is a fine one, but it doesn't quite apply to my reading of a tale that I (apparently) wrote over a quarter of a century ago. I wasn't intended to be the receiver of the story, for one thing; it wasn't a note to myself. But I'm not even sure about my self any more; I seem to be multiple, and I can see no bridge suspended across the gulf between the parts. Where is the real me? Can I point my finger at my true hand when both of the samples displayed above apparently came from my pen? If handwriting is supposed to be unique, what happens when the 'owner' of the handwriting is anything but unique (in the literal sense of the term)? (I'm slipping into the labyrinth marked out by Jorge Luis Borges in 'Borges and I', I fear.) I'd use my eyes and ears to solve the mystery again, but are the eyes with which I'm watching these words appear on the screen really mine, or do they belong to him, the one who just happens to share my name, date of birth, fingerprints, and DNA? In 'The Severn Bridge Adventure', I don't see my story. Looking at this piece of history, I see only his story.

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

Crime Scene Inkvestigation

I stand inkused of a crime that I didn't commit.

Two mysterious purple stains were found on our bathroom floor yesterday. They are presented above as Exhibits A and B. I was, of course, immediately blamed by the Inkette for their presence. 'Something to do with your stupid inks, no doubt', she snarled as she read me my rights. Luckily, I escaped the full force of the law because she had actually asked to have her little-used Lamy fountain pen filled 'with something purple' the previous night so that she could write a letter to a friend. (After weighing up the options, I chose Noodler's Purple Wampum. No, dear readers, I haven't finally managed to convert the sceptic to ink: when she noticed a small purple stain on her fingers, she immediately vowed to return to ballpoints for all future correspondence.) She probably assumed, then, that I had spilled a few drops of Wampum onto the floor as I generously, selflessly filled her pen.

I knew that I hadn't, though, so, donning my deerstalker and brandishing my magnifying glass, I inspected the apparently inkriminating evidence. Within seconds I knew that Wampum was not to blame: the colour of the stain was significantly different. Ink fact, it resembled none of the many shades in my collection. Where, then, had it come from?

One of the archetypal scenes in crime fiction is the moment at which the detective, faced with the scene of a crime, reconstructs events in order to solve the mystery. (Perhaps the greatest example of this is the unforgettable moment in The Wire when McNulty and Bunk visit the apartment where D'Angelo Barksdale killed a woman some years earlier. There's simply no point in my trying to describe the sequence; it is, fortunately, available on YouTube for readers who do not mind expletives and a little nudity.) And I, as the son of a detective who spent the last years of his career dealing with murder scenes, have investigation in my blood.

Cordoning off the bathroom, then, I set about recreating the moments that might have led up to the marking of the floor. Notebook in hand, I sketched out the room with my newest ink, Noodler's Aircorp. (This is a delightful, greenish blue-black, inkidentally. Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan and I have already had a quick conversation about the strange lack of an 's' at the end of 'Aircorp'. I thought it might be an American variation, but he says that it isn't. I will be exploring the complete Oxford English Dictionary for variant spellings, and I may even get in touch with the Ministry of Defence. Expect a dossier on your desk by oh-nine-hundred hours, General.)

I worked through the night, fuelled by strong coffee and a chain of cigarillos. Just as the sun was rising and I was on the verge of giving up, I suddenly solved the mystery. I was absolutely right to believe that ink played no part in the affair. After sketching the room for the fifteenth time and running through every possible scenario, I remembered that I had, upon returning from the supermarket the previous evening, placed a packet of toilet rolls on the floor of the bathroom while I cleared a space for them in the cupboard. The packet in question is presented above as Exhibit C, members of the jury. If you look at the right-hand side of the plastic wrapping, you will see a purple-blue band that advertises the inclusion of three extra rolls. A forensink examination of this section has revealed the colour to be identical to that found on the floor of the bathroom. And the stains are right next to the bath, from which the Inkette, who had taken a shower shortly before I arrived home from the supermarket, is particularly good at splashing water. I must have placed the packet onto an Inkette-created puddle, which, in the time that it took me to clear a space in the cupboard, reacted with the dye on the right-hand side of the wrapper to leave a purple stain on the floor.

I think that wraps things up. My case is watertight. Ink is not to blame. There is no stain upon my character. I am an inkocent man.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black; Noodler's Walnut.

The Left Hand of Darkness

Sinister developments are at hand.

Regular readers of Ink Quest will know of the Oedipal power struggle in which I am engaged against Baby Ink. Even though he has only been in the world for about four months, he has so far managed to be born on my birthday (which is thus no longer mine), sleep through his first ceremonial visit to a pen shop, and scream at the top of his voice when I wheeled his pram towards the pen counter in a local department store. He is clearly determined to resist me and my inkfluence every step of the way. (This doesn't just apply to pens, inkidentally: I have tried playing Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece to him, but he showed no interest whatever. The sounds of Gwen Stefani, meanwhile, drive him into a state of frenzied excitement. There is no doubt that I have work to do.)

But there has now been an even more significant development in the power struggle: we suspect that Baby Ink is going to be left-handed. I haven't checked the precise moment at which this becomes fixed -- is it genetic? randomly acquired after some time? -- but we have noticed in the last week or so that he has started to use his left hand more than his right to grasp things or simply to poke himself in the eye.

Please don't misunderstand me: this turn to the left does not alarm me for the unpleasant reasons found in the dark days of the past. At earlier moments, Baby Ink would probably have been whisked away for exorcism or drowning as soon as the left hand became prominent. The Latin word 'sinister', le(f)t's not forget, originally simply meant 'on the left', and many European languages continue to preserve an association between what lies to the left and what lies uneasily: the French 'gauche' can also mean 'awkward', the Greek 'skaios' additionally suggests something ill-omened, the Italian 'mancino' also implies crookedness, and the Welsh 'chwith' can also be applied to what is wrong, sad, or strange, for instance.

But this is not why Baby Ink's leftism alarms me. I am worried, rather, that he will, if he is indeed a leftie, become even more opposed to fountain pens and ink as he grows up. The screaming and the sleeping, that is to say, might just be the beginning.

There are, of course, many left-handed users of fountain pens, but writing with such an instrument for these people is something of a trial, for the fleshy side of the hand that holds the pen is in a position where it's left little choice but to smudge the emerging ink. Just three weeks ago, in fact, I found myself talking to a wonderful artist who has created works about writing and ink. 'But do you write with a fountain pen?', I asked as she admired my Aurora Talentum and Noodler's Walnut ink. 'No, I'm left-handed', she said. 'It's just impossible'. Does this mean that Baby Ink will, in the ultimate act of Oedipal resistance against the captain of the Penquod, grow up to be a user of ballpoint pens?

To make matters even worse, I have been looking forward to the day when he receives his first guitar. The plan was that we would travel over to London for the day, meet up with his Uncle Nixon, and stroll down to the guitar shops on Denmark Street. When Nixon and I had finished trying out the guitars (for the benefit of Baby Ink, of course), he would be allowed to choose his favourite. If he happened to be nudged in the direction of an instrument that I'd also like to own, so be it. But if he turns out to be left-handed, I, a rightie, will not be able to share his guitar.

My immaculate plans are crumbling, dear readers. What is to be done? Perhaps a little militaristic discipline would help. Perhaps Baby Ink could be strongly encouraged, with a little Full-Metal-Jacket-style boot-camp shouting and drilling, to start using his right hand. With this in mind, I have just ordered a bottle of Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black from The Writing Desk. I've established in previous entries how ink affects my mood; maybe this new colour will transform my wimpish being into Sergeant Ink, the toughest drill instructor of them all. I do hope so: I must make things right as quickly as possible, for I fear that there's not long left.

Inks in use today: Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue; Herbin Café des Îles.

PS (21/8/07): I knew that the crew of the Penquod would come up with something: Anna has emailed to say that Baby Ink's first fountain pen, if he turns out to be a leftie, could be one of the Pelikano Junior models designed specifically for left-handed beginners. You don't escape my clutches that easily, Baby Ink...

One More Cup of Coffee, One More Bottle of Ink

I'm dealing with a blend of addictions.

It is probably obvious to anyone who reads Ink Quest that I am addicted to ink. But I actually suffer from another, equally powerful addiction: coffee. I have, to quote T.S. Eliot, 'measured out my life with coffee spoons'. And this morning, in a frothy twist, my two dependencies came together when the postman delivered a parcel from The Writing Desk containing a bottle of Herbin Café des Îles ink.

I would describe the colour of my new acquisition as something like a cross between Omas Sepia and Diamine Dark Brown. It flows rather nicely, too, and a broad nib (such as the Aurora italic with which I've been using it today) allows for some very tasty shading. Above all, though, it looks, as its name suggests, exactly like coffee (a medium-strength latté, to be precise, in my opinion).

Even though I never take milk with coffee -- why buy a drug and then cut it with something else? -- my new ink is driving me to consume more espressos than I usually would in the course of a day. In the light of the recent case of Jasmine Willis, I fear for my health and anxiety levels, dear readers. My addictions are brewing each other into stronger shots of themselves.

I probably drink far too much coffee at the best of times. I'm hopelessly addicted, in fact: if I don't have at least three espressos by 11am, a crushing headache sets in. Former caffeine junkies tell me that this pain fades within a day or two, but I've never been strong enough to make it past about 11.10am.

My ink and coffee addictions are evidently different beasts, though, for only the latter can cause physical withdrawal symptoms. I might feel cheapened and unclean if I had to write with a ballpoint for an entire day, but I don't think that there would be any repercussions at the level of the body. Meanwhile, I haven't honed my love of coffee into an all-consuming obsession; I don't have a parallel blog called Drink Quest, for example. Well, not yet. I recently stumbled across a forum called Coffeegeek.com, and I've realized that there's a whole world of caffeine just waiting to be explored. There's also a fascinating history to the beverage, as Claudia Rosen's little book called Coffee reveals. She reports, for instance, that cultivation of coffee may have begun as early as the late sixth century, and that the word from which 'coffee' is ultimately derived was originally a poetic name for wine; only in the late thirteenth century in the Yemen did the term find itself used to describe the drink made from the berry of the coffee tree. It took a lot longer for the drink to make its way to Europe, though. And when it did -- in the seventeenth century -- its dark presence met a fair amount of resistance. Italian priests urged Pope Clement VIII to ban the beverage among Christians as a Satanic substance, for instance, but the Pope had clearly developed a taste for the 'hellish black brew'. 'Why', he declared, 'this Satan's drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it.'

While I have not allowed my love of coffee to percolate into a full-bodied obsession, I do have some vivid coffee-related memories. I can clearly recall my first proper cup, for instance. I was about sixteen years old, and I'd grown up in a house where coffee was rarely consumed. When it was, it would only ever be the instant variety (which is, I now know, to the world of coffee what ballpoints are to the world of pens). For reasons lost in time, I decided one afternoon to go out and buy some paper filters, a plastic cone that balanced on top of a cup, and a packet of strong French blend. To complete le look continental, I believe that I also purchased a baguette and walked home saying 'Bonjour' in my head to anyone who walked past. Perhaps I placed too many grounds in the filter when I got home, or perhaps my delicate teenage body was simply unprepared for what was to come, for I can still remember the moment when the caffeine kicked in and I started to feel like a cloud. (If only Nicholson Baker's Room Temperature had been published by then; I would have known that this is merely what's called being operatic with caffeine.) I haven't looked back since, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of coffee-free days in the last twenty years of my life.

In fact, I suspect that I'm constantly trying to recapture that initial euphoria. (Don't they say that heroin addicts are always searching for a high like their very first?) The problem, though, is that twenty years of constant coffee consumption has transformed my once-pure body into a caffeine-tolerant wreck that merely needs its fix to keep the headaches at bay.

And it's here, I think, that my two addictions differ. With coffee, that first cup was the perfect one, the golden one, and every subsequent sip has taken me further away from an identifiable state of original bliss. Yes, I've enjoyed some glorious blends along the way -- at the Berkeley branch of Peet's, where I spent a great deal of money during a year as an impoverished student at the University of California; at the Heathrow Hilton; in a tiny breakfast room in the basement of an unassuming hotel on the Left Bank; in an even smaller bar next to a flea market on the other side of Paris at the crack of dawn; at Mangia Bene delicatessen in Bath; in the Casanova restaurant in the centre of Cardiff; and in Ink Towers a month or so ago, when honorary Penquod crew member Anna kindly sent a package of Caffe Ladro's Diablo variety over from Seattle -- but I've never quite regained that original glow.

With ink, however, it's different: there was never a golden moment, a glimpse of a perfect colour which I'm trying to regain. While the wanderings of the Penquod feel like an epic odyssey, they're not, for Odysseus knew exactly where he was trying to go. Perhaps that's why the inkthusiasm is more consuming, more obsessive than the love of coffee: I really have no idea what the ideal colour looks like, where I might find it, or even if it exists. Café des Îles has been very pleasant to use today, and I'm sure that I'll take another sip or two in the future, but it's not The One. I must press on, keep filtering good ink from bad, search out grounds where I haven't yet bean.

Ink in use today: Herbin Café des Îles.

Recyclink

Some things can't be rushed.

Because last Tuesday was my final day in work before the start of my summer holiday (an event which in part explains my slowness to post), I decided to walk a little further than usual from my office for my lunchtime sandwich. Yes, that's right: I really let it all hang out that day, lived it up, bit into the fruit of life and let the juices run down my chin. As I was strolling slowly in a carefree manner along Senghenydd Road, I noticed countless Inktown City Council recycling bags sitting outside houses, awaiting collection. I think that they initially caught my eye because Ink Towers is located in the next county over, where green plastic boxes are provided for this purpose; it seemed slightly odd to me that recycling would be collected in the capital city in disposable plastic bags.

But this observation was soon eclipsed when I noticed that one of the transparent bags left outside a house towards the bottom of the street contained a collection of empty fountain pen cartridges (Parker Quink, I believe). They had been cleaned out and wrapped in their own plastic bag within the larger recycling sack.

I believe that there is a law, not to mention a social convention, that forbids passers-by from rummaging through rubbish that has been left out for collection. I also believe that knocking on someone's door and saying 'I noticed some cartridges in your recycling bag. Are you by any chance an ink lover?' is frowned upon in polite society. I walked on by, then, dear readers, and enjoyed a mozzarella, tomato, and pesto sandwich in the glorious sunshine. (In my mind, if not on the menu, it even featured an Oxford comma as delicate seasoning.)

But I have been thinking about those discarded cartridges ever since, recycling their image and implications in my mind. I think that their contradictory presence is what has intrigued me. Whoever placed them out in the street for collection by the recycling van was clearly committed to environmentally sound practices, for s/he had thought to rinse out and carefully wrap several rather small pieces of plastic. But here's the contradiction: if their user is so concerned about the damage that disposable plastic does to the environment, why doesn't s/he use a converter and bottled ink? Yes, it's possible that the converter would be made of plastic too, but the whole point of converters is that they're reusable. Their beauty is that they can be filled and refilled over and over again; there's no need to remove an empty cartridge, search for another, and then think about how best to dispose of the defunct object.

I'm all for contradiction. (I believe, in fact, that I've quoted on at least one previous occasion Walt Whitman's wonderful line about merrily contradicting himself.) Life would be remarkably dull if people were consistent, coherent, the same as themselves from minute to minute. But isn't being an ecologically concerned cartridge user taking things one step too far? What kind of confused inkdividual could live like that?

Today, however, more than a week on, my mind is far from cartridges, for I have just received from Los Angeles a letter displaying numerous bottled inks that are not currently stored in the hold of the Penquod. There are simply too many thrilling shades to digest and discuss here tonight, dear readers, but I will single out for special attention two new Noodler's colours: Brooklyn Brawn and Pinstripe Homage (a subtle sepia and a greenish blue-black, respectively). They're made exclusively for Art Brown in New York, so it looks as if the Penquod will be paying hefty import taxes in the near future. The author of the letter, who shall go by the pseudonym of Sharona, also included a delightful purple-black mix of her own creation.

Strangely, though, it was another ink that really caught my eye when I read the letter: Herbin Café des Iles. While many of the colours on the sheets were completely new to me, the shade in question is one that I have seen on numerous previous occasions. I've never felt compelled to add it to my collection, however, even though it's a member of the brown family to which I have devoted so many months of the quest for the perfect ink. This evening, though, Café des Iles called out to me, as if its impact had been percolating gently for several years. I have, therefore, just ordered a bottle from my usual supplier, The Writing Desk.

I will surely need also to acquire in time many of the other shades featured in Sharona's letter, but a shot of Café des Iles should keep me happy for at least a few days. I don't know why it took so long for me to fall for this particular colour, though. (I had a similar experience with the Pelikan M200 fountain pen, inkidentally. When I first saw the plain, simple design, I thought that it was bland and uninspiring. But within months I was secretly searching out pictures of it on websites in the dead of night. I bought one soon after, and it's still one of my favourite pens.) Why wasn't it love at first, second, or even third sight with Café des Iles? Perhaps the colour needed to pass by my eyes several times before its beauty registered. Perhaps, that is to say, it simply needed a little recycling.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Diamine Blue-Black.