Masked and Anonymous

I have to ask: is ink a mask?

I've never wanted to be linked with a particular shade of ink. I've never wanted someone to see words written in a given shade and be given to think of me. Roland Barthes, my great hero, apparently used a certain blue with such regularity that those who knew him remember his presence whenever they see that ink. (Antoine Compagnon has written movingly about this, and Daria Galateria, in a charming little piece called 'Les couleurs du Neutre', can't help referring to the the blue ink in which the manuscript and index cards of Le Neutre are 'illuminées'.) I, by way of complete contrast, cannot commit myself to a single shade; monoginkmy constantly escapes me.

The notebook in which I'm writing these lines, for example, holds words that glow in something like sixteen different colours. And when I added an index card written in Mont Blanc Racing Green to the noticeboard outside my office today, I was struck by how its neighbour, which has been there since the beginning of the semester, was penned in an entirely colour (Herbin Café des Îles, to be precise).

I think that this constant shifting might be a form of masking, of masquerade. I came to this conclusion on the way home from work this evening when I sat down on the train and retrieved from my briefcase Exit Ghost, the new Philip Roth novel. Before I could sink back into the captivating tale of withdrawal from the world (we're told at one point that Zuckerman has been living in isolation 'all day with the alphabet'), disgust, and the usual Rothian misanthropy, I spotted coming towards me down the aisle of the carriage someone whom I very vaguely know. Even though we've never really said more than 'Hello' to each other, there was a terrible moment when I thought that I was going to be trapped in conversation instead of my book, but she passed on by with just a greeting. What Larry David, another hero of mine, calls the 'stop and chat' had been avoided.

As we were getting off the train to change to another, however, she came over and said 'I hope you didn't think I was being rude by not stopping'. 'Of course not', I replied. 'I was reading a book, so I was perfectly happy with "Hello"'. Worried that this was about to escalate into a 'stop and chat' about not having been drawn into a 'stop and chat', I decided to head quickly for the waiting room. As I approached its door, a man came out wearing a large Halloween mask. He whooped something and ran down the stairs towards the exit.

Once I'd got over my initial and habitual response of 'Must we have festivities?', I began to envy the wearer of the mask. If, I reasoned, I were to walk around all day wearing some kind of mask, no one would be able to corner me with a 'stop and chat'. I'd be as good as invisible. I could finally be free to be isolated and live all day with the alphabet.

I suspect, on further reflection, that my constant flitting from ink to ink is a form of masking. One of the things I dislike about handwriting is that it's usually seen as the unique sign of a particular individual. What the hand leaves upon the page is an index to the author. I'm not at all comfortable with the fact that people might come across something that I've written and, in the shape of the letters, find a link back to me. Writing should be, as Roland Barthes once put it, 'the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin'. I want to be masked and anonymous when I take up my pen.

Promiscuity at the level of ink is, I now suspect, an attempt to smudge the index, to erase the apparently insurmountable link between the written and the writer. I'm stuck with my handwriting, but I'm free to change the colour of my words from page to page. And perhaps the dramatic shift of shades is meant to be a distraction, a way of diverting attention.

The problem with masks, of course, is that people always want to know what's behind them. Bob Dylan, yet another of my great heroes, has spent over forty years trying to deflect attention away from himself by donning a series of metaphorical masks (the acoustic hobo, the electrified Beat, the born-again Christian, the cowboy, the star of a Victoria's Secrets advertisement, and so on). While I haven't yet had the chance to see it, Todd Haynes' new film, I'm Not There, would appear to be all about this restless multiplicity. But the problem for Dylan has always been that fans want to know what's behind the mask; they want to get beyond the masquerade to discover the real Robert Zimmerman. The masks, in other words, have made matters worse: they have merely intensified others' desire for the real thing.

But perhaps there's another way to think about masks. Long before Bob Dylan was born, and long before my ink quest began, a psychoanalyst named Joan Riviere wrote an essay entitled 'Womanliness as a Masquerade', in which she argued that femininity is a kind of mask that women often feel compelled to adopt in order to cope with the demands of patriarchal society. The part of the essay that's always intrigued me most is the paragraph where she writes the following:

The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the 'masquerade'. My suggestion, however, is not that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing.

There is, in other words, nothing hidden 'behind' the mask. The mask is all there is.

Why can't the same be true of ink? Why can't it be a mask that has nothing behind it? Forget about depth; remain at the level of the surface. Ink is all there is. All is ink. Beyond the colours, I'm not there.

Masks in use today: Mont Blanc Racing Green; Stefan's 'Black Rose'.

PS (1 November): I've now inserted a hotlink to a YouTube clip of the classic 'stop and chat' moment from Curb Your Enthusiasm. And those unfamiliar with the phenomenon of 'double-dipping' may wish to follow the newly added link in Sunday's post to the Great Costanza at the buffet table.

Non-self-degifting

The gift, after all, was not poison.

I recorded in the previous entry my anxieties about the bottle of Diamine Imperial Blue that I had recently sent to honorary Penquod crew member Stefan. The neurosis became even more intense after I'd posted my thoughts, dear readers, for I happened to remember that the word 'gift' has a curious etymological link to 'poison'. Here, for those inkterested in such things, is how the Oxford English Dictionary explains matter:

[Com. Teut.: OE. ift str. fem. (recorded only in the sense ‘payment for a wife’, and in the plural with the sense ‘wedding’) corresponds to OFris. jeft fem., gift, MDu. gift(e (Du. gift fem., gift, gift neut., now more commonly gif, poison), OHG. gift fem., gift, poison (MHG., mod.G. gift fem., gift, neut., poison), ON. gift, usually written gipt gift (Sw., Da. -gift in compounds), pl. giptar a wedding, Goth. -gifts in compounds:OTeut. *gifti-z fem., f. root *ge- GIVE v.]

But I am now happy to report that Stefan did not, on reading Sunday evening's ramble, suddenly come to see his gift as poison and dispose of the ink. Displayed above, in fact, is a photograph that he took of the bottle in question sitting upon the masthead of yesterday's New York Times. This evidently proves that he is a non-self-degifter. (I love the way that the present has been positioned in such a way that the baseball player in the picture on the front page of the paper looks as if he's just realized that a giant ink bottle is going to crush him to death. I can think of no finer way to go. Here lies the author of Ink Quest. He lived for ink; he died beneath it.)

I have, in other words, managed not to poison a friendship with my concerns about perceived thrift-gifting. And it even turns out that I have, for all my enduring misanthropy, managed to start bringing people together over ink and pens. Daphne, my fountain-pen-using colleague, happened to mention yesterday that she'd been involved in a nib-related inkident in the university library some days earlier. When one of the librarians handed her a loan slip to sign, he offered her his fountain pen. She said that she didn't think our sacred instruments were supposed to be used by anyone apart from their owners, to which the librarian replied that he couldn't find a ballpoint pen for her to use. I understand that they then got around to talking about how Sheaffer fountain pens (of which Daphne is a user) compare to Parker models (of which the librarian is an owner).

As Daphne was narrating her inkounter, I immediately recognized the librarian in question to be my old inkquaintance Arty, who has made several appearances on the margins of Ink Quest over the years. When Arty used to work in one of the cinemas in the city, I was always trying to persuade him to exchange the vile, chewed ballpoints offered to customers at the ticket office for inkwells and flamboyant quills. While this campaign was unsuccessful, I am delighted to learn that Arty has inktroduced a fountain pen to the issue desk of one of the university's libraries. And I'm truly astonished that my tireless campaign against the poison of ballpoints has begun to spark conversations between strangers. Ink links. Everything is connected in the end.

The Word is clearly spreading, seeping, feathering. The underworld is rising. Ink Quest is the gift that keeps on giving.

Inks in use today: Mont Blanc Racing Green; Herbin Café des Îles.

Thrift-gifting

You don't need to be present.

The Inkette and her older sister, Sister Ink, went to Bath on a big shopping trip yesterday, so Baby Ink and I were left to our own devices. As he's approaching the age of six months, I felt that it was an appropriate time to inktroduce him to the essentials of male existence, so we went fishing on the high seas, hunted a couple of deer, wrestled bears with only our hands, and rounded the afternoon off with a bullfight and a game of poker. (I'm exaggerating, of course: we actually went for a walk around the Roath area of Cardiff, and I sat drinking coffee while he dribbled and shouted at strangers.)

Because I knew that the Inkette would be passing a Herbin ink stockist while in Bath, I gave her an index card with two names written upon it: Cacao du Brésil and Larmes de Cassis. 'Accept no substitutes', I said, checking that our watches were synchronized. 'Look lively, soldier'. I had started to conduct the ink quest by proxy.

I thought that I'd assigned a fairly straightforward mission: one shop and one question about two inks. Private Inkette ended up on something of an odyssey, however, for the shop to which I'd directed her redirected her to an artists' supplier just around the corner. From here, she was sent empty-handed to an exclusive jewellers with a Mont Blanc concession. This establishment did, of course, only sell Mont Blanc inks, but the assistant did kindly take the Inkette and sibling down into the vault to inspect all of the colours in stock. Even though she claims to have no inkterest in my collection, the Inkette somehow knew that I already own Racing Green, Sepia, and Bordeaux. And here the ink quest (licensed franchise) came to an end.

They did not come back without anything for me, however, for I was presented with some magnificent cufflinks and a dainty bottle of eau de toilette upon their return. Receiving these gifts, while undeniably pleasant, reminded me of an ink-giving social dilemma in which I have found myself this week. Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that the Penquod could not continue on its endless search for the perfect ink without its dedicated crew of nib-wielding inkthusiasts who send me vials, tips, espresso beans, chocolates, and written samples of inkteresting colours. One of these loyal companions, Stefan, has been getting very excited about Diamine Imperial Blue recently, so when I saw that my local pen shop has started to stock the shade, I bought a bottle with which to write him a note.

As soon as I opened the bottle, filled my pen, and told Stefan what would soon be arriving through his letterbox, he mentioned in passing that he had just been out to celebrate his birthday. I immediately decided that my loyal crew member, whose date of birth had been unknown to me until this point, should have a bottle of Imperial Blue as a gift, and I called back into the pen shop a day or two later.

And that's where the troubles began. As I was wrapping the box and getting it ready to send, it occurred to me that Stefan, who knew that I had just bought myself some Imperial Blue, might think that I was merely passing on to him a secondhand bottle from which I had already filled a pen. Seinfeld is usually good at naming such social difficulties, but neither regifting (the act of passing on to someone else a present that has been given to you by a third party) nor degifting (the taking back of a gift from an individual who no longer deserves it) quite applies here. Double-dipping is close, I suppose, but that specifically refers to the practice, perfected by George Costanza, of inserting the same tortilla chip more than once into a communal bowl of salsa, guacamole, and so on. I have, therefore, been forced to come up with my own name for the crime of which I am innocent: thrift-gifting.

I was so worried that my present would be seen as a sham, I ended up writing an accompanying note in which I stressed that the enclosed bottle was not the one that I had recently bought for myself. But then, once the package was on its way, I began to panic that I had gone overboard with my denial, as if I were trying too hard to cover up a social felony. I have finally been driven to what I see as a solution: I know that Stefan received the ink some days ago, so I am displaying above a photograph of my Diamine Imperial Blue strategically positioned on top of the masthead of today's Sunday Times newspaper. If I had thrift-gifted, such an image would be impossible. (Well, there's always Photoshop, I suppose, but I will gladly post a print-out of the contents of my iMac's hard drive to prove that I do not own this piece of software. What, you claim that I could have deleted it from my computer? Perhaps it's just easier if I take a polygraph, have it filmed, and display the footage here.)

But now I'm worried that I've simply gone too far. I should, perhaps, have just let things be. Have I, in going to such lengths to show that I am not a thrift-gifter, actually ruined the gift itself? Shouldn't the giving of presents be a simple, uncomplicated affair? Must I always assume that people will think the worst possible things about me? Perhaps Stefan will read this entry, see the picture, feel his Imperial Blue now to be worthless, and pour it down the drain. Would it be overstepping the mark to ask him to photograph his full bottle on top of the masthead of tomorrow's New York Times to prove that he has not self-degifted and made his present absent?

Ink in use today: Diamine Violet (kindly sent to me in a vial by honorary Penquod crew member Noelle).

Inklish

They're here! You're next!

As a child growing up in Wales, a country colonized by England many centuries ago, I was taught to regard all things English with suspicion. They, insisted certain teachers and relatives, had invaded, done their best to kill the language and the culture, and thereby prevented Wales from fulfilling its potential. (When I asked what we might have been if only we'd fought off the colonizers, however, the answers were a little vague. The fourteenth-century poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym was sometimes held aloft, as was the glory of Welsh coal, but words produced six centuries earlier and an accident of geology never quite persuaded me that we could have been a contender.)

I soon learnt to see all forms of nationalism as a complete waste of time and blood, and over a decade of my adult life has been spent living happily in England. Besides, Wales has never struck me as a utopia; R.S. Thomas' brilliant, bitter 'Welsh Landscape' offers a perfect account of everything that's wrong with my homeland. No nation now but the imagination, as I've said here in the past, dear readers.

But it's funny how deeply ingrained some of that childhood nonsense can be. On Saturday afternoon, for inkstance, I called into a jewellery boutique in the city to collect a bottle of Mont Blanc Racing Green ink that had been ordered especially for me. When I read the back of the box a little later, I was surprised to see that the colour is known as 'English Green' in all of the other languages I could decipher ('verde inglese', 'vert anglais', and so on).

My initial, instinctive response was 'English Green? But I'm Welsh'. Once I'd repressed this atavistic reaction, I began to worry about the offence I might have caused by asking to have a colour associated with 'the oppressors' shipped into the country. I tried to reconstruct my time at the counter in the shop. Did any of the assistants look like fervent Welsh nationalists? Could I detect in their voices the rhythms and sounds of native speakers of Welsh? Was I handed the bottle with a scowl? Had my debit card details been noted with a view to siphoning off my immense wealth into a secret bank account belonging to a radical separationist organization?

As we walked around the city for the rest of the afternoon, I became increasingly paranoid about the bottle of ink stashed underneath Baby Ink's pram. People, I was sure, were looking at me strangely, as if they knew that I was hiding something illicit. I kept waiting for the moment when one of them would, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, point at me and utter a piercing scream to identify the monstrous Anglicized misfit.

And then it got worse. I have written here in numerous previous entries about Baby Ink's stubborn, Oedipal refusal to take an interest in pens and ink. I now suspect that he's also a passionate nationalist, for he launched into an uncharacteristic screaming fit as I was quietly looking at the books in Borders. Although he cannot yet form words, I'm convinced that he was yelling 'Yma! Yma! Yma!', which is the Welsh for 'Here! Here! Here!' I managed, by fleeing from the shop, to thwart his Body-Snatchers-like attempt to have me captured and converted, and I somehow made it back to Ink Towers in one piece. Baby Ink, perhaps accepting failure, soon dropped off to sleep.

When I opened the bottle of Racing Green, however, I discovered something rather strange: the colour is indistinguishable from Noodler's Sequoia. The latter is one of my favourite shades, but I was hoping for something slightly different when I ordered the Mont Blanc. (Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not suggesting that Noodler's is secretly making ink for Mont Blanc. The bottle of the Racing Green explicitly says 'Made in Germany', while the Sequoia clearly affirms its American origin. It's merely that the inks themselves look identical.)

On reflection, I suspect that Baby Ink is to blame. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the alien colonizers create replicas of the residents of Santa Mira, California. When the duplicated human falls asleep, his or her double takes over. As he's evidently working for Them, Baby Ink must have resorted to Plan B when his attempt to have me seized in the centre of Cardiff failed. By the time we got home, he'd somehow turned my new Racing Green ink into an exact replica of a colour that I already own. And the speed with which he fell asleep can be explained by the fact that his work for the day was then over. He had successfully eradinkated the presence of English Green. The inkvasion of the bottle snatchers has begun.

Inks in use today: Mont Blanc Racing Green; Stefan's Black Rose (a wonderful mixture of Noodler's Black and Ottoman Rose).

I Know Why the Caged Bird Inks

This is the dawning of the age of the cage.

I've mentioned in previous posts that my unremitting misanthropy draws me towards the life of the anchorite. I have come to realize, however, the impracticality of such an existence. (Omnia vanitas, as it were.) How would I shop for ink, pens, and espresso beans, or gaze forlornly through jewellers' windows at watches that are priced beyond my eager reach? And wouldn't being bricked up in isolation get a little boring after a while? True anchorites are, I suppose, trying to find themselves and, above all, God; I, on the other hand, have spent my life trying to escape from myself, so being shut away with only yours truly for 'company' would surely be inviting some kind of apocalypse. I don't, moreover, need an extended period of solitary meditation and contemplation to come to the conclusion that the universe is without meaning, that no one is out there, that life is merely a slouching towards nothingness, and that 'les choses sont contre nous'. This is already gospel to me.

I think that I've found the solution, though. It came to me from the pages of Flaubert's Sentimental Education, where Frédéric at one point arrives at Dussardier's shop to find him 'writing at a desk, surrounded by ledgers, in a sort of cage'. The novel says nothing more about Dussardier's curious contraption, but I've already started to draw up detailed plans for a cage of my own. (Note to Virginia Woolf: you were thinking too big.)

Construction can't begin soon enough, I feel. I've been working in the library quite a lot in the last week, and I'm constantly annoyed by others sitting too close to me, disturbing my train of thought and requiring me to rearrange my pens and papers so that they take up less space. If I had a portable cage, however, I could arrive early at my chosen spot, spread out my belongings with wild abandon, and then erect the bars around myself. I wouldn't be an anchorite, but I would be able to keep troublesome others at a comfortable distance. And if my cage had a lockable door, I'd be able to leave my shiny pens and sheets of deathless prose safely on the desk while I popped to the café around the corner for my version of communion (espresso and a pain au raisin). Crowds would surely gather in my absence to marvel at my elegant handwriting and scintillating paragraphs, but no one would be able to steal what I had tantalizingly left on the table.

Come to think of it, perhaps I could go everywhere in my cage. Everyday life, I find, is one long struggle to keep strangers at bay. When I walk from the railway station to my office in the morning, for instance, at least three Metro employees try to thrust a copy of the vacuous free newspaper into my clenched fist. And the journey back to the station in the evening usually involves an encounter or two with smiling faces who want to sign me up for a credit card, introduce me to Krishna, or invite me to an evening of repetitive beats at a brightly coloured nightclub. (Don't these people know what they're up against? Do I look like I want to 'get funky'?)

The cage could keep these circling souls away. They would be barred from getting too close to me. 'I'm sorry, but I'm in a cage!', I could yell, pointing to the bars and shrugging helplessly. 'Are you offering me ink or espresso?', I could enquire from behind my barrier. 'If you're not, please step away from the bars, or I will switch on the current.' (I've just realized that I'm willingly becoming the Bubble Boy, with whom George Costanza, in one of his finest moments, fought over a misprinted Trivial Pursuits question card. Moops! Moops!)

I'm going to live life at arm's length. I don't care how cagey this seems.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Eternal Brown; Noodler's Midnight Blue (a lovely blue-black recently slipped through the bars of the cage by honorary Penquod crew member Anna).

'All is ink'

At last: words by which to live.

I've never been fond of mottoes and slogans. (I'm excluding 'Les choses sont contre nous', of course.) They always suggest movements, causes, banners, and eager gatherings to me, and the problem is not merely that I share Groucho Marx's suspicion of any club that would have me as a member; more importantly, I generally subscribe to his 'Whatever it is, I'm against it!' principle.

But all of that changed today. Sceptical Ink Quest reader and colleague Carlos told me yesterday that he had, while flicking through a book at his parents' house, stumbled across a sentence in which Edward Thomas uses the phrase 'All is ink'. Carlos didn't have a precise reference, but he did tell me that the words appeared in a letter written by Thomas to Gordon Bottomley. So, donning my deerstalker and reaching for my magnifying glass, I set off for the university library this afternoon and tracked down a volume containing all of Thomas' letters to Bottomley.

After some searching, I eventually found the epistle of which Saint Carlos had spoken. It's dated 18 February 1903. Thomas begins by reporting that everyone is congratulating him for securing a contract to write a 60,000-word book about Oxford. But poor Edward is in a terrible state over what he has agreed to do. 'I am not only sick at having to scatter so much ink over the beautiful mother, but panic-stricken with the feeling that I have not the courage, or the endurance, or the information that is necessary', he frets. He then asks if Bottomley can suggest any books on the city that might help him through. 'Of course', he adds, 'I can probably quote from Matthew Arnold, Newman, De Quincey, Lionel Johnson &c &c & so delight myself and fill space. Inkitas inkitatum. All is ink.'

All is ink. Has a phrase ever summed up so inkredibly neatly my worldview? (I must admit that I also like the way it could easily be smudged into a Kafkaesque 'All is in K'.) I need these three words tattooed upon my flesh, emblazoned upon the sails of the Penquod and chanted by its crew, carved into the sky.

Reading Thomas' anxious letter came at a good moment, too, for I have spent the last few days panicking about a publishing commitment of my own. In a foolish moment some months ago, I agreed to translate one of my essays into French so that it can appear in a book alongside pieces in that language. (When I say 'essay', I'm referring to the boring, unread, achingly unimportant texts that I have to produce as part of my equally meaningless job, and not one of the dazzling, globally adored gems that appear here, dear readers.) I don't quite know what possessed me to agree to this. I can read French (slowly and with a dictionary to hand), and I can understand various things said to me in the language if the speaker goes slowly enough. But the last three days have proved to me that translating from English to French is un ball-game différent altogether. I'm producing sentences, yes, and I can see how I got from the one language to the other at any given moment, but I have no idea how my rosbif prose will read to native eyes. A French colleague has generously offered to check the 'finished' product for me before I send it to les éditeurs, but this wil inevitably lead to my total humiliation. He may even drag me to the guillotine.

Edward Thomas has given me hope, though. Instead of worrying about the accuracy of my translation as I worked this afternoon, I simply admired the beatiful brown ink that was flowing from my pen to form les mots. I learnt, in other words, to 'delight myself and fill space. Inkitas inkitatum'. For all I sink, all is ink.

Aujourd'hui, j'utilise les encres suivantes: Omas Sepia; Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black.

The Tell-Tale Bottle

In 'The Tell-Tale Heart', one of Edgar Allan Poe's most chilling tales, a murderer believes that he has committed the perfect crime when he kills and dismembers his victim, and then secretes the body parts beneath the floorboards. When the police arrive to investigate a report of a disturbance, the killer calmly persuades them that nothing is awry. (He says that the scream heard by a neighbour was actually 'my own in a dream', and that the deceased is 'absent in the country'.) But just as he congratulates himself on the 'perfect triumph', things begin to unravel. He begins to hear his victim's heart beating beneath the floorboards. Its sound gets louder and louder, and the murderer eventually shrieks: 'I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart.'

Relax, dear readers: I have not stashed the body of a biro user beneath the floorboards of Ink Towers. Yet. But my house is inhabited by a forbidden bottle of ink that is calling out to me in tones that grow louder with every passing minute. I do not know how long I can remain innocent.

The Inkette surprised me on Saturday afternoon by asking to be taken to 'that pen shop' to buy a bottle of ink. No, I have not finally won my battle against her skeptinkism; she merely wished to purchase a present for a friend of hers who writes with a fountain pen. If I had known about these plans earlier, I could, of course, have spent hours -- nay, weeks -- working on lists of options for the Inkette's acquaintance. But given just five minutes' warning, I had to think quickly. As we walked to Pen and Paper, I mentally catalogued all of the brands stocked by the shop. Although the shelves feature Waterman, Parker, Sheaffer, and Visconti, I soon decided that it would have to be a Diamine colour.

When we entered the establishment, I directed the Inkette towards the ink section (she usually waits outside and sighs wearily to herself when I cross the threshold of the shop), pointed out some of my favourite colours, and watched as she chose another shade altogether: Diamine Violet.

This, dear readers, is a colour that I do not own. But as I write these words with trembling hands, the bottle sits upstairs, taunting me to open it. Try me! Try me!, it teases as I try to sleep. Open my lid! Open my lid!, it calls as I attempt to sit in my chair and read. But I can't even take a tiny sample, for there is plastic shrink-wrapping around the top.

I'm never very good at resisting temptation, but the ink's constant calling is particularly hard to fight at the moment, for I am still trying to recover from the traumatic encounter with the hideous Diamine Dark Green that I discussed in my previous post. For this very reason, I have been using other (and reliable) Diamine colours in my collection during the last week, and I even bought an 80ml bottle of Diamine Imperial Blue on Thursday in an attempt to erase the memory of the green monster and save the honour of the name 'Diamine'. The latter is a fairly pleasant purplish blue -- honorary Penquod crew member Stefan is very keen to see a sample, and I will, as soon as the current four-day Royal Mail strike is over, be dispatching a vial -- but I can still see the horror of Dark Green when I close my eyes and try to sleep.

On the one hand, I know that Diamine Violet is not going to be the perfect colour. It will probably do little to cancel out its green cousin, and it will certainly not be The One that brings the Ink Quest to an end. On the other hand, though, I can't bear the thought of my house being home to a bottle of ink that I cannot open, a shade that I have never tried. I have dared to take its photograph, as you can see above, but I am forbidden from getting any closer.

A line from Van Morrison's beautiful 'In the Garden' keeps going around in my head: Within your violet you treasure your summery words. What mysteries lie within that bottle marked 'Violet'? Can I really keep myself from unscrewing the lid? (To make matters even worse, the Inkette has just informed me that her friend's birthday is not until December, so I have a couple of months of this agony to endure.) I must ignore the tell-tale bottle, stay a shrinking violet in its presence, remain Poe-faced.

Inks in use today: Diamine Imperial Blue; Noodler's Lexington Gray; Omas Sepia.

PS (10 October): Honorary Penquod crew member Noelle has kindly offered to siphon some Diamine Violet from her new bottle of the untouchable colour, and to send the sample to me for inspection. But will I still want to open the bottle that taunts me at home? Can its seal remain in-violet? (Thanks to honorary Penquod crew member Stefan for the pun. I can always rely on him for purple prose.)

Paper Trail

I have been on the paper trail. It led back to my door.

The Inkette had booked a lengthy haircut and pampering session on Saturday, so Baby Ink and I were left to our own devices. I decided to take him into Cardiff in search of ink. Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that he has spent the first few months of his life showing no interest whatever in ink and pens. He is five months old this week, so I thought that I'd test once again for the activation of the inky gene.

As his pram crossed the threshold of Pen and Paper, Cardiff's only proper pen shop, I waited for the screaming to begin. He usually reacts to such places like The Omen's Damian responded to churches, but he remained silent on this occasion. Taking this as a good omen, I quietly wheeled him towards the ink section, where I immediately noticed that new stock had arrived. Lots of it. Pen and Paper usually keeps a good selection of Diamine inks in the little 28.4ml containers, but it has now expanded its range to include the larger 50ml bottles with the delightful Bakelite-like lids.

There were so many shades on offer, in fact, that I found it hard to choose. Worried that Baby Ink's uncharacteristic silence couldn't possibly last, I grabbed a box of Diamine Dark Green, a colour which has always caught my eye on The Writing Desk's website. (In reality, the shade is thoroughly disappointing. I was expecting an enigmatic, Sequoia-like green-black, but it turns out to be an obvious, vulgar green.)

We left Pen and Paper and made our way up the Royal Arcade to Cardiff's latest shopping attraction: Borders. I know that enlightened, liberal souls aren't supposed to like multinational bookshops, but I've been waiting for years for Borders to come to the city. Ever since the wonderful Chapter and Verse independent bookshop closed in the late 1990s, we've had to endure the reign of Waterstone's, which seems these days only to be interested in stocking multiple copies of autobiographies by rugby players.

I've been looking forward to Friday's big opening of the store for some weeks. (I'm not the only one, either, for my esteemed colleague Carlos confessed on Friday afternoon that he was skipping a lecture by a Very Important Visiting French Philosopher to explore the shelves.) I hadn't anticipated the Saturday crowds, though. The presence of an olde town crier outside the shop should perhaps have prepared me for the swarming mass of humanity inside the doors. What, I thought, are all of these strangers doing in my shop? And why do people in bookshops, more than any other type of outlet, always look so offended when I politely ask if I can squeeze past with my pram? I'm not asking for philanthropy -- misanthropy will always be the one for me -- but I will run over your self-important toes if you don't move. And my son has been trained to vomit in any direction on command.

We battled our way to the lift and made our way up to the first floor. The store directory -- or map, to be more precise -- claimed that a branch of Paperchase lay upstairs, so I thought that I'd look for some new paper to use with my ink. (Paperchase, while generally disappointing, does sometimes stock Rhodia notepads.) As soon as the lift doors opened, however, I knew it was a lost cause: a solid wall of people stood between us and the shop floor. Baby Ink's armoured pram was immediately reduced to a paper tiger. We stayed in the lift, returned to ground level, left the shop, and made our way back to Ink Towers.

As we drove through the Butetown Tunnels, I felt somewhat disappointed that I had not been able to find some new paper on which I could write with my Diamine Dark Green. (I didn't know at this point, of course, how hideous a colour it is.) By the time I had parked the car and unloaded Baby Ink, I had come to see the day as a total failure.

As soon as I opened the door of Ink Towers, however, everything changed. We suddenly struck gold on the paper trail. The post had been delivered while we were out, and I immediately recognized the elegant handwriting on a large envelope as belonging to Gerry, the Michigan-based honorary crew member of the Penquod. With racing heart, I opened the envelope to find that, Russian-doll-like, it contained more envelopes and samples of the most exquisite writing paper known to the human race. The ever-generous Gerry (see the entry of 31 May 2007 for an example of his kindness) had remembered a comment that I once made about the remarkable beauty of his stationery, and had selflessly parted with some of his collection.

Scared to make a mark upon these glorious sheets, I have been gazing at them in awe whenever I have since passed my desk. Their day will come, but I'm happy to treat them as objets d'art for now. The paper trail eventually led back to my point of departure. I ran around the city in search of stationery when all I needed to do was remain stationary.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Eternal Brown; Noodler's Nightshade.