The Passing of the Torch

The brown bells of Merthyr need not worry.

In 'Bells of Rhymney', an old Welsh folk song that tells you in its three verses everything you need to know about the melancholic streak that affects many of 'my people' (please note the misanthropic, anti-nationalist inverted commas), the bells of Merthyr ask if there is hope for the future. I usually think that there is no hope whatever for the future, that everything is getting worse, and that there is, to quote one of my favourite Beckett moments, 'nothing to be done'. Today, however, I have seen a rare, brief, inky glimmer of hope.

The day began particularly badly. Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that the final week of September is always something of a trial, for I am forced at this time every year to enrol hundreds of new students using a vile ballpoint pen. The situation was even bleaker than usual this morning, because I realized as I signed their paperwork that most of the new arrivals at the university were born in 1989, the year that I left secondary school. An entire adult life now separates me from my students. If there had not been such a long queue in front of me, I would have retired to my office and ordered my headstone. (Epitaph: 'He was old. Nothing to be done.')

But then a miracle came to pass. When I have signed a student's enrolment form, I have to ask him or her also to sign. I usually point out the relevant place and simply hand over the ballpoint. But when I tried to pass the biro to one particular student, she politely declined my offer and said that she would prefer to use her own pen. It was, of course, a fountain pen (a Parker Frontier, to be precise). I watched in amazement and admiration as she carefully signed her name in, I think, Parker Quink Blue. We had a very short conversation about the superiority of a real nib (I thought better of revealing the true extent of my obsession with ink and pens), and then it was time for me to deal with the next student, who did, of course, happily use the ballpoint to sign his name.

I feel as if the torch has passed to the next generation. I can now happily order my headstone, safe in the knowledge that there is at least one eighteen-year-old keeper of the flame studying in the university where I am shuffling wearily towards oblivion. I never thought I'd say this, but there is hope for the future.

Ink in use today: Herbin Café des Îles.

PS (27 September): Honorary Penquod crew member has just emailed me a link to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about the generation gap that struck me yesterday. I'm not the only one slipping into the grave, it seems.

Inks R Us

I have little of substance to offer.

This is true in a general sense, of course, but I'm referring specifically here to news of my recent trip to Belgium in search of the perfect ink. My last visit to Ghent was, as the Ink Quest entries from 30 March and 3 April 2006 record, extremely successful in terms of writing instruments. This time, however, I came home empty-handed.

The two pen shops that I visited eighteen months ago are still there (as, inkidentally, is the incongruous hairdressing salon that caught my attention at Brussels airport in 2006; I found out this time that it's called 'Hair Lines'). Timmermans, shown in the first picture above, continues to stock a mouth-watering range of pens and related products, but every writing instrument upon which my restless gaze settled was way out of my price range. And none of the various inks on display called out to be added to my collection. (Some I already owned; others simply didn't appeal.) Caron, meanwhile, was a little less exciting than when I slipped through its doors in March 2006. I remember from that occasion a glass cabinet filled with Sailor and Herbin inks, but this was nowhere to be seen on the weekend. (I was particularly disappointed that Sailor ink was not on sale, for I had taken along for the trip a box of Sailor Blue cartridges, and I'd been loving writing with the colour throughout the conference that was the 'real' reason for my being in Belgium.) The range of pens stocked seemed to have shrunk, too. It was, however, rather difficult to manoeuvre around the shop, for the counter was surrounded by teenagers buying flavoured tobacco. Maybe this is where the real money is. Maybe the ink side of the business has gone up in smoke.

Somewhat disappointed still to have a wallet full of euros, I wandered back to my hotel for an afternoon nap. As I went to close the curtains, I spotted something outside the window that instantly lifted my mood. I hadn't noticed until this point that my room, which was on the fourth floor at the front of the hotel, was right next to one of the giant letters attached to the wall to spell out the name of the establishment (Hotel Carlton). My view of the city, that is to say, was dominated by the rather elegant 'R' shown above.

Some people might have found this distracting or unattractive, but I came to think of it, during my four days in Ghent, as the staR attRaction. I felt as if I were on the set of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, where strange neon letters stare in through the windows of the flat where the murder takes place. The owners of the hotel must have known that I was just the type to like type outside his window.

None of my friends who were staying in the Carlton could see the attraction. When I pointed out my 'R' with rapture, they merely said 'Hmmm' or nodded politely. Am I the only person who has ever taken a photograph of the letter 'R' as a souvenir of Ghent. R theRe no otheR loveRs of the letteR out theRe? And shouldn't the hotel be emphasizing its typography-dominated rooms on its website?

These strange obsessions of mine, I think, go some way towards explaining why Ghent's two fine pen shops left me feeling a little disappointed on this occasion. I buy most of my ink online, where it's easy to indulge in obsessions. I can, at the click of a mouse, order obscure colours and brands not usually found in shops. (It's hard to imagine, for instance, a real-life establishment stocking as many shades as the internet-based The Writing Desk.) And I think that the web has spoilt me a touch, for no shop in the real world can ever cater for my obsessions like the realm of the virtual. On the rare occasions when I venture out of my compound into society, things are bound to be disappointing. I should just stay in my room. That's where the exciting things R.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Nightshade; Noodler's Sequoia.

PS (27 September): Honorary Penquod crew member Hugh has emailed to say that the 'R' found outside my window in Belgium is Helvetica. Why is the hotel not advertising this on its website? 2007 is, after all, the fiftieth birthday of the typeface in question. Come to think of it, why wasn't the world premiere of Helvetica: The Movie held in the hotel?

Anchors Aweigh!

Ink Quest will fall silent until the beginning of next week, dear readers, because the Penquod is about to set sail for Belgium. Longtime addicts of this blog will remember that the last trip to Belgian shores in March 2006 led to the acquisition of some lovely Sailor Brown ink and a Pilot Custom 74 fountain pen, so I hope to be able to waffle next week about what I find on this voyage. Tot straks!

Inks in use today: Noodler's Sequoia; Noodler's Walnut.

This Sport/Ink Life

'Watching the game tonight?'

I'm at the till in a clothing shop, waiting for the card machine to ask me to enter my PIN. The sales assistant has finished folding and wrapping my new trousers, and the period of silence has obviously made him feel awkward. He has, therefore, asked me a question. About sport. Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that I despise all forms of sport; I despise even more the assumption that I, because I am a man, will like sport.

'I didn't even know that there is a game tonight, to be honest', I reply. I haven't been rude, I assure myself; I've simply answered the question in the only way I can. The debit card machine, meanwhile, is going slowly to spite me. It occurs to me that a team of fraudsters may have obtained my bank details and emptied my account. Les choses sont contre nous.

'Oh', he says. He looks surprised. 'It's a big one: England v. Fiji.'

'Oh', I reply. 'In which sport?'

'Rugby.' He now looks rather confused.

'Oh, okay. Why is it such an important match?' Again, my tone is polite. The machine is still thinking about whether or not it's going to approve the sale.

'It's part of the Rugby World Cup!'. Incredulous now. He suspects that I'm making fun of him, which I'm not.

'Oh, I see. I didn't realize that such a thing existed. I've heard of the football one, but not the rugby one.'

'Gosh, you must keep yourself hidden. They're playing some of the world cup games here in Cardiff over the weekend!' A different voice now. The man standing behind me in the queue has decided to join in, to share his disbelief. I'm hemmed in by sports fans. They've got me in a scrum.

'Yes, hidden from sport. That's the idea', I reply.

The card machine finally asks for my PIN. With a limp wrist, I type in my number. My purchase is handed to me. Apart from a 'Thank you', nothing more is said. I have killed the conversation, kicked it into touch. I leave the sports fans to discuss rough games and, no doubt, my strangeness.

Why sports? Why must sport be the default topic of conversation when male strangers feel the need to break a silence. (What's wrong with silence, though? Can't we just all go around saying nothing to each other?) Most of the time, I believe, sports-related banter in such situations is purely phatic: no one really cares what is being said; what matters is that the silence is broken with something, anything. The man in the clothing shop was perfectly friendly, but I don't think that he actually cared whether or not I was watching the game later that evening. His question, rather, was just a way of being sociable.

But why sport? Couldn't it be ink, for inkstance? Couldn't he have said 'What do you think about the new Herbin colours?' or 'What kind of pen did you use in work today?' If the name of the game is phatic, it really doesn't matter what the topic is, does it? So, men of the world, let's make writing instruments the topic of conversation when we find ourselves compelled to talk to other men whom we do not know. Try it out, dear brother, next time you feel the urge. Your addressee might think that you're strange, and you may get a punch in the face, but if you're reading this blog, you probably are a little odd. (I'm excluding the people who, according to Sitemeter.com, come here by mistake and leave immediately. I'm still getting a few weekly hits from individuals who have typed 'How do I remove biro from a cheque?' into Google, and the repetition of that phrase in this sentence ought to attract a few more fraudsters. How do I make banknotes? How do I turn lead into gold? How do I make a fake passport? There, that ought to increase the traffic a little.)

Let's see if ink can defeat sport, knock it out in the first round. Give it a go. Kick the idea around for a while. Indulge me. We'll have a ball. Be a sport.

Inks on the team today: Noodler's Walnut; Noodler's Sequoia.

PS: When the Inkette read my handwritten draft of this entry last night, she vowed to dress Baby Ink today in the Welsh rugby shirt that her sister bought for him when he was born. Seconds out...

Mugged

The day began so well. I should have known that it couldn't last.

I awoke feeling fully refreshed, for Baby Ink had decided to sleep from 7pm until 7.45am without interruption for the very first time. Once I had checked that he was still actually alive, I ground some of the Caffe Ladre Diablo espresso beans sent over from Seattle by honorary Penquod crew member Anna, and fired up the Moka pot. As I sat at the table sipping the result, I marvelled at the perfection of the coffee and the heavenly feel of the mug itself.

I'm very particular when it comes to my morning coffee mug, dear readers. I regularly top up my caffeine levels throughout the working day with spikes of espresso served in paper takeaway cups, and this never bothers me. But that first hit of the day has to come from precisely the right container. It must be a mug; I can do cup-and-saucer delicacy by about 11.30am on a good day, but absolutely not before then. And the mug has to be of the right thickness and colour. I don't want anything too chunky -- I like to feel the heat of the coffee against my sleepy fingers -- but I don't want something so thin that those dainty hands will be scalded and unable to hold a fountain pen. I find the feel of thin china between my lips distinctly disappointing, too. As for the colour, it's not the outside that counts; it's the inside, which must be white. Black coffee from a mug with a dark lining is sacrilege. I'd rather put my best Noodler's ink in a biro.

Luckily, I have woken up every morning for the last two years and reached for what I believe to be the perfect mug. It's pictured at the top of this entry, dear readers, and it is, as you can see, one of the vintage Penguin range. There's a lot to admire about the look of these glorious little creatures -- the elegance of the typeface, the classic colours -- but they are also, quite simply, ideal in build and feel for my obsessive needs.

This morning's mug joy was elevated to a higher level when, upon arriving in work and ceremonially unpacking my pens, I realized that I'd managed to fill my three daily writing instruments with the perfect combination of inks: Walnut, Sequoia, and Nightshade. The Penquod may wander and enjoy brief inkounters with other colours, but these three Noodler's shades are the ones to which I always return.

This rare moment of serenity soon plummeted back into neurosis and disappointment, however, when my dear old friend Nixon innocently sent me a photograph of his new acquisition. It's shown in the second picture displayed above, dear readers, and you'll notice that it's one of those fashionable Pantone mugs. More importantly, it features the word 'ink' on its label. I actually saw a display of these objects of beauty in a gift shop recently, possibly in Bath, but I somehow managed to overlook the inky model. I am, of course, now desperate to lay my hands upon one of these items. I could think of ink while I drink! When I looked at my once-perfect Penguin in the kitchen this evening, in fact, it struck me as suddenly imperfect, and I know that tomorrow morning's splendour of coffee will be slightly disappointing.

Is this what my life boils down to: the search for the right liquid (whether ink or coffee) to put in the right container (whether pen or mug)? Other people seek enlightenment, inner peace, happiness, a god, 'the good life', fame, wealth, or a place in history. I, meanwhile, am measuring out my life with coffee spoons and ink converters. Have I set my sights too high? Geekily low? Is this it? Am I just a mug?

Inks in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Noodler's Nightshade; Noodler's Sequoia.

Blues Run the Game

I was talking about ink at Nick Drake's grave.

In a dream, that is. I've never been to Tanworth-in-Arden to see Drake's headstone, but I found myself there as I slept a couple of nights ago. I've been an admirer of his music since, one day in 1990 as I busked on the streets of Exeter, a man came up to me and said: 'I like the Nick Drake thing you've got going with the guitar.' I said I'd never heard a note of Drake's music, and he replied that something in my playing reminded him of the Pink Moon album. I immediately decided to use the money I'd earned from singing and playing that day to buy Pink Moon, but the record shop into which I called on my way back to my student halls of residence only had a compilation called Heaven in a Wild Flower. On tape.

I bought it none the less, and played it as soon as I was back in my room. I was hooked within seconds, although I quickly realized that my guitar playing would never be anywhere near as good as Drake's. I can only conclude that my preference -- if I may get technical for a moment -- for playing in DADGAD tuning caught the ear of the passerby, for Drake, I soon discovered, was fond of experimenting with tunings that departed from the conventional EADGBE.

That was a long, long time ago. You may find it hard, dear readers, to imagine the elegant, urbane, immaculately groomed author of Ink Quest busking. (Or talking to strangers in the street, actually.) Things were rather different back then. I had yet to discover the joys of fountain pens and ink. I even had long, unruly, Drakean hair, as you can see from the appropriately censored photograph posted above. Quickly: whisper the words 'Cary Grant', and perhaps it will go away.

While a great deal has changed since that photograph was taken, my love of Nick Drake's music has remained constant. It seems that most people believe Bryter Layter to be the masterpiece, but Pink Moon, his last album, has always been the one for me. (Trust me to favour the bare acoustic sounds of a man has lost the will to live.) And it was Pink Moon that, in my recent dream, I was trying to discuss with the spirit of Drake.

More specifically, I was rambling about 'Place to Be', the second track on the album. (This is my favourite Drake song of all: the percussive strumming of the strings -- tuned to DADGAF#, if I remember correctly -- is astonishing.) And I was trying to convince the ghost of Nick Drake that he'd been singing about the subject of this blog. 'The lines that go "Now I’m weaker than the palest blue/Oh, so weak in this need for you" are about ink, aren't they?', I said to thin air. 'You're singing about blue ink, aren't you? So which blue do you think is the palest blue? Noodler's Britannia's Blue Waves? Herbin Azure Blue? And did you cover Jackson C. Frank's 'Blues Run the Game' as some kind of inky companion piece?' I waited for a reply to come from the headstone. Nothing happened.

My attempt at speaking with the dead failed, in other words. A good friend of mine wrote a book called Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History a few years ago, actually, and I once asked him if his research had unearthed any fictions where there's an attempt to make the dead write. The dead regularly speak in literature, but do they ever take up their pens? He said that he couldn't think of any such cases.

This isn't really surprising: Western culture has a long history of associating life with the voice. Writing, meanwhile, is deadly, inferior, fallen. (See the early work of Jacques Derrida for more on this.) But my oneiric visit to Tanworth-in-Arden saw no sign of living speech coming from beyond the grave. Perhaps I should have written to Nick Drake about ink. In fact, I've always thought that it would be much more interesting to receive a letter, rather than a vocal address, from the dead. What would the handwriting look like? Which colour ink would be chosen? What kinds of mysteries would the missive reveal? Could the words do justice to the act of dying? (Was this Monsieur Valdemar's problem? Should he have tried to write instead of speak?) And would all such correspondence be handled by the dead letter office?

Not long after I awoke from this strange dream, in a strange twist, the postman delivered a parcel from honorary Penquod crew member Anna. It contained some truly intoxicating Caffe Ladro Diablo espresso beans and three blue inks: Noodler's Luxury Blue, Swisher North Sea Blue, and Diamine Registrars' Ink. Blues really do run the game.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Luxury Blue; Swisher North Sea Blue.

About Face

The sheer face of it.

Inkoids: this is what the Inkette has started calling the crew of inkthusiasts with whom I regularly correspond about the thrilling world of ink and fountain pens. 'Inkoids', she snorted. 'Like androids, but weirder.' She finds it strange that my day can be made by the arrival of an envelope from faraway shores containing nothing but a sheet of paper with ink samples upon it. 'But it's not even a letter: it's just a list of things like "American Blue", and "Emerald City Green", and there are straight lines drawn all over the place', she once complained.

What really puzzles her, I think, is the fact that I know next to nothing about many of the crew members of the Penquod. I receive emails from, and send emails to, Stefan and Anna several times a week, for instance, and packages containing vials of ink are always winging their way across the Atlantic, but we've never met or spoken. Although I have spent many hours writing to these two people, I have no idea what they look like, sound like, or even how old they are. (Contrary to what the Inkette believes, our exchanges are not always about ink and pens. Stefan and I, for instance, have recently spent a great deal of time discussing expanding waistlines, the typography used on motorway signs, and whether or not the borough of Queens in his native New York ever featured an apostrophe. If there's a burning issue, you can count on us to be considering it.)

Why doesn't this bother me? Why do I not find it remotely problematic to call people with whom I've only ever had contact at the level of the written word friends? (I've revisited my copy of Jacques Derrida's Politics of Friendship, but he somehow neglected to inklude a chapter on this issue.)

I am, let's face it, not the best person to answer these questions: I have a profound dislike of face to face communication and socializing, and I hate using telephones. If I could conduct my entire life via the written word, I would. (Perhaps I could be an anchorite with access to a mail slot.) I have never understood Western culture's obsession with meeting people and, above all, the face. I can't see how eyes are the window to the soul; a person's i's -- how he or she forms them upon the page -- are far more revealing, in my opinion. While I love the melody of Loewe and Lerner's 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face', especially when it's sung by Jack Jones (who, in an unforgettable moment, wished the Inkette and I good luck from the stage as we prepared to leave for our wedding in Las Vegas), I've always thought it should be 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Scrawl', or possibly 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Typeface'. If this makes me a face-ache in the eyes of the majority, so be it.

This preference for the face-less, I now realize, probably goes a long way towards explaining my love of ink and writing instruments: if I value the written over the spoken and the face to face, using the right ink and the right pen is crucial. I don't mean that in terms of status symbols, of being seen to own the most expensive pen on the market; I'm simply looking for what looks write to me where it really counts. And I will make instant and permanent judgements about a person's character, history, and morality based upon his or her choice of writing instrument. I ink, therefore I am.

I have to face the facts, though, and accept that I am at odds with the weight of convention. The face is a force to be reckoned with. The devoted readers of Ink Quest (which has just welcomed visitor number 13,140) are, let's face it, bound to be falling over themselves to find out the real identity of the author of this multi-faceted blog, and from there to learn what the captain of the Penquod looks like. I'm staying in my compound, I'm afraid, but I have made one small concession to Western norms. (This may well be a first.) Displayed above, dear inkquisitive ones, is a photograph of me that has been put through the rather amusing 'Simpsonize Me' treatment. You now know what I would look like if I lived in Springfield.

I offer this, but nothing further. I have set my face against unveiling more. This is as face to face as it gets. This is not an about face.

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

PS (4 September 2007): Having read my ramble about not knowing what many of the crew members of the Penquod look like, Stefan has taken a small step towards revelation by emailing me a picture of himself as a Simpsons character. I thought that I would share this with you, dear readers, so that you can create a more accurate mental image of day-to-day life on the deck of our unstoppable ship.