Obsolute

I'll have to grow accustomed to being obsolete.

Because Baby Ink has been suffering from conjunctivitis and is forbidden from returning to nursery until this afternoon, he came with me this morning to the local council offices in Barry Docks to collect a new parking permit for the Penquod. This may sound like a simple trip, but it quickly deteriorated into a Costanza-like event when, aware of the flight of steps at the front entrance to the rather grand building (which, bizarrely, has its own Wikipedia page), I rang the bell to be admitted instead via the step-free disabled access door. 'Can I help you?', asked a woman, frowning as she walked towards the door from the inside. The positioning of the pane of glass meant that she couldn't see Baby Ink in his pushchair. 'I have this with me', I said, pointing downwards. I nearly added '... and it can vomit in any direction on command' when she came right up to the window to make sure that I wasn't trying to sneak my able body in. Our credentials established, we were admitted and allowed to proceed to the reception to pick up the parking permit. As we were waiting on the platform for the train to come to take us home, I saw a large white van drive by. On its side were written the following words: Broken fridge disposal service.

I have often whined here about the modern culture of disposability that nourishes, among many other things, the unrefillable ballpoint pen. When something breaks these days, we're encouraged simply to buy a replacement. Finding someone to repair, say, a radio is difficult, and it's likely that, should you be lucky enough to find such a person, he or she will tell you that it will cost you more to have the radio repaired than to buy a new model. My grandmother, who was born in 1906, used to complain in her final years about how the small Welsh town in which she lived all her life no longer had a shop that would repair broken umbrellas (or 'gamps', as she called them). In her youth, she recalled, an umbrella was bought to last a lifetime; if a spoke came loose, you simply went to the 'gamp shop' and had it sewn back in. Umbrellas are just the tip of the iceberg, though, as the 'Broken fridge disposal service' proves. Even bulky electrical goods are designed to be discarded, rather than repaired, when they malfunction. Whenever I take garden waste to the local tip, I'm amazed at the army of ultra-modern fridges, washing machines, tumble driers, and dishwashers that guards the entrance. And my good friends over at Chimpomatic have started to photograph the countless television sets regularly dumped on the streets of London.

As I've noted in previous posts, I see the fountain pen and real ink as antidotes to the culture of disposability. While a biro is meant to be discarded as soon as its 'ink' (I use the term in the loosest possible sense) runs dry, a fountain pen is an object of beauty that will, accidents aside, last a lifetime. I now realize, however, that things are not quite so simple, for my old friend (and former Lamy champion) Nixon recently emailed me a link to a website called Obsolete Skills that is devoted to 'things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us'. Alongside skills such as 'Using a slide rule', Nixon noticed an entry for 'Refilling a fountain pen'. It would seem, in other words, that my obstreperous weapon against the obsolete is itself obsolete.

With this in mind, I have decided to flaunt my obsolescence at every turn. I am replete with the obsolete, hear me roar. My fountain pen and my inky fingers will be proud and public signs that I am firmly behind the times, tiller of a killed skill, member of a lost tribe. I have turned my back to the future; the past is my present. 'Got to go back', as Van Morrison once put it.

I have, ink fact, found a perfect term to describe my joy in the obsolete: obsolute. According to the complete Oxford English Dictionary, this word is, appropriately enough, obsolete in modern English. (The most recent use given dates from 1679.) The OED defines 'obsolute', quite simply, as 'Absolute, perfect, consummate'. We consummate inkthusiasts know that modernity is where all that is solid melts into air-holed biros. Only the obsolete is obsolute.

Obsolete and obsolute fluid in use today: Diamine Indigo.

Cheque Out

I'm having a hard time keeping my emotions in check.

It's a bleak, bleak day for British inkthusiasts and lovers of fountain pens: Tesco, the nation's largest supermarket chain, will, as of today, no longer accept payment by cheque. Marks and Spencer brings in a similar ban on 1 March; Asda, Argos, Boots, Debenhams, Next, Sainsbury's, and WH Smith have already turned their backs on the little slip of paper that requires a pen to mark it with an authentic signature.

This mighty 'cheque out' has been defended on the grounds of consumer demand. According to an article published on the BBC News website last month, only 4 per cent of transactions in the UK now take place by cheque; 60 per cent, meanwhile, are handled by debit or credit card. While 1990 saw 11,000,000 cheques being issued every day, the figure had, the article continues, fallen to 5,000,000 by 2006.

I'll leave aside the fact that 5,000,000 cheques per day is still quite a significant number for such a small nation; what really worries me is that the 'cheque out' campaign is secretly part of the much wider conspiracy against nib and ink. As long as paying by cheque was an option, inkthusiasts had a public outlet for their obsession. Who among us, dear readers, has not quietly enjoyed holding up a long queue of shoppers -- ballpoint users, no doubt -- by insisting on using a fountain pen at the checkout, and then asking for blotting paper to be brought forward as a matter of urgency? It's true, of course, that cheques will survive for a little longer underground, as it were: we will still able to use them when, say, ordering ink by mail. But these 'notes from the underground' will be made behind closed doors, in private. If people can't see fountain pens and proper ink being used to write cheques in public, how will they ever learn to see the error of their ways, rise up, and shake off the plastic shackles of the ballpoint? How can we nib lovers -- the vain vanguard -- save those lost souls if our ink is invisible?

It occurs to me as I prepare to march into my local branch of Tesco and demand to pay by cheque that the 'cheque out' campaign is actually the conclusion of a long and devious campaign against ink. Probably around a decade ago, many large shops in Britain started offering to print cheques, leaving customers merely to sign in the bottom right-hand corner. While there was no longer any need to write by hand the name of the recipient and the amount payable, at least the signature survived. But not for long. A couple of years ago, to much fanfare, the 'Chip and PIN' system was launched, which meant that transactions by credit and debit card -- which had traditionally required a signature -- would now proceed with just the input of a four-digit Personal Identification Number. (I, of course, immediately chose 1984.) Proof that this move away from writing instruments has made people into idiots can be found in the fact that it's now perfectly common to hear references to a 'PIN number'. Every time I hear this phrase, I am seized by the urge to scream, 'But the "N" already stands for "number", you fool fool'.

The only common method of payment that still allows for the use of fountain pen and ink, in other words, is the cheque. And I don't need to subject it to a detailed check-up to see that its pulse is fading fast. I urge all British-based readers of Ink Quest to fill trolleys and baskets with goods in Tesco, Marks and Spencer, and every shop that has stopped accepting cheques, and then, when the final total is rung up, to get out their cheque books and fountain pens and say, 'To whom should I make it payable?' If we sit back and do nothing, it's checkmate.

Ink in use to write cheques today: Private Reserve Burgundy Mist; Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

PS: Would potential muggers and Bic-wielding ruffians kindly note that I was joking when I stated that my PIN is 1984?

Le Style Haut

I'm back.

In two senses of the phrase. First, after a fortnight's absence, Ink Quest is back online. My wounded iMac is still in intensive care, and I dread the arrival of the bill, but I have managed to borrow a laptop from work so that I can access the internet at home while the surgeons are at work. Second, the Penquod arrived back at Ink Towers last night following a short work-related trip to Paris. I hereby present you with my inky Parisian diary.

Sunday 17 February

Walking across the tarmac from the plane, I look up and find myself confronted by the brutal, beautiful concrete beast that is Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport. I have always suspected that J.G. Ballard had a hand in the design of this unsettling building. As usual, I get lost trying to make my way from Terminal 1 to the RER station. It's no accident that Marc Augé began his book on 'non-places' with a reference to Roissy's spatial and social laboratory. Don't misunderstand me: I'm fully in favour of dehumanized and deracinated environments, but the pleasures of misanthropic isolation are ruined if you then have to make contact with another human being to ask for directions, aren't they?

I eventually find the RER station and make the journey into the centre of Paris. At my hotel on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, I perform the customary ritual that transforms the 'non-place' of my room into my temporary royaume of ink (a 'kinkdom', if you will; echoes of the Marquis de Sade are entirely coinkidental). As usual, I have separated ink from pen for the flight: my trusty travelling pen, a Visconti Van Gogh, has been carried in the comfort of my hand luggage, while a small and chic tin of Herbin Lie de Thé cartridges -- parfait for Paris -- has been secreted in the hold. As I have noted on previous occasions, I hate the travelling that unfortunately comes with my job, so I attempt to make trips bearable by structuring everything around ink and pens. Before I unpack a single item of clothing, then, and before I go exploring the city, I slide a cartridge of Lie de Thé into the Visconti and scribble a few sample lines in my notepad. At last: tout va bien.

At around 8pm I decide to wander the streets of Paris. To be more precise, I have just one destination in mind: Mora Stylos on Rue de Tournon. Longtime readers of Ink Quest may remember the entries from January 2007 in which I reported on the voyage of the Penquod to several Parisian pen shops. For reasons best filed under 'The (pregnant) Inkette had had enough', I didn't make it to Mora Stylos on that occasion, so a visit is absolutely essential on this occasion. The only problem is that I have an extremely busy two days in the city, so it looks as if a brief dash first thing on Monday morning is the only option.

I decide to test and time the route from my hotel to the shop, carefully studying the map beforehand for possible short cuts. It takes about ten minutes to get to Rue de Tournon. Because it's Sunday evening, the shop, of course, is closed. A heavy metal shutter prevents me from peering with beating heart through the window.

I take a short detour on the way back to the hotel, strolling in awe down the beautiful Rue Servandoni, where Roland Barthes lived for much of his life. (I look for a commemorative plaque of some kind, but nothing appears to exist. I make a mental note to write a furious letter to Monsieur Sarkozy.) I wonder if petit Roland, my great hero and self-confessed lover of pens (one of his interviews is entitled 'An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments'), used to make the short journey from Rue Servandoni to Rue de Tournon on his own ink quest.

Back at the hotel, I sit at my desk and write the words that you have just read. The Lie de Thé -- one of my favourite browns -- looks more elegant than usual. Perhaps, like Guinness, it's best enjoyed in its country of origin. I fall asleep and dream that Roland Barthes accompanies me to Mora Stylos to try out some inks. He chooses a bottle of Royal Blue. I, of course, do the same. Back at his flat on Rue Servandoni, we unpack our purchases and fill our pens. He passes me an index card upon which to write. We compare notes. Even though we've used exactly the same ink, his card looks infinitely more elegant than mine. When I point this out to him, he replies, cryptically, that the explanation for this discrepancy lies in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, which, outside the world of the dream, I was reading on the plane from Cardiff to Paris. 'It's all in the melancholy', he adds.

Monday 18 February

The clock is ticking. Mora Stylos opens at 9am, but I have a pre-meeting meeting at 8.30am with the person who has invited me to Paris as an expert étranger to take part in the assessment of research at several Parisian universities. I can handle the étranger part, but the other word in my title is giving me some cause for concern, as it's my ambition never to be an expert of anything in higher education. It occurs to me, though, that expert étranger has probably been chosen to convey just how much of an expert I am at being foreign or, better still, strange.

The rendezvous is over by a little after 9am, and I'm told to be at the office of the governmental agency responsible for the assessment exercise at 11am. I race over to Mora Stylos, where the shutters are now open, as the photograph displayed above shows. Inside I find a stunning array of writing instruments -- Omas, Taccia, Pilot, vintage Parker and Conklin -- but this is a trip with a limited budget, and the Inkette has already placed an order for some Chanel No. 5 and 'something cute and French' for Baby Ink, so I keep my credit card in my wallet and hand over twelve euros for a bottle of Private Reserve Burgundy Mist. As I'm running on cartridges during my stay in Paris, the lid will have to remain closed for now.

On my way from Mora Stylos to the rendezvous in the 2nd arrondissement, I zoom into FNAC to pick up a copy of the French release of Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn. I'm not really interested in the film itself (which is one of Hitchcock's weakest efforts, and which I already own), but I am interested in one of the extras included only on the French DVD: Mary, the extremely rare German remake of Murder!. While I'm there, I have quick look in the children's section for books by Éric Sanvoisin, author of the magnificent The Ink Drinker mentioned in earlier Ink Quest posts. The ink-well, alas, is dry, but, as I make my way to the tills to pay for the Hitchcock DVD, my eye is caught by the five-volume Oeuvres Complètes of Roland Barthes. Could I fit them all in my case? Hmmm... I lift the entire set off the shelf to test the weight. I nearly collapse from the effort. Fairly certain that my travel insurance doesn't mention cover for 'injuries caused by attempting to carry multi-volume reference works by major French thinkers', I make my way to the tills with just the Hitchcock DVD in my strained hand.

I find myself thinking fondly of my new ink on numerous occasions throughout the day, which was filled with long, technical meetings and, of course, an endless line of awkward social situations. I am entirely to blame for the latter; I must stress that I was treated like royalty by the staff in the three universities visited and by the other members of the committee. The problem was that I, as expert étranger, was the only non-native speaker of French at any given moment throughout the entire event. Everyone was perfectly understanding and spoke slowly and clearly in French, but I find polite conversation wholly unnecessary and puzzling in English, my native tongue, so having to do it in another language is pure torture. (Again, people were perfectly understanding and often switched to English, but that somehow merely reinforced my inadequacy and general hopelessness.) In my head I formulated coherent French sentences filled with dazzling wit and complex puns, but my mouth refused to play along. In the course of two agonizing days, I found myself constantly becoming Joey Tribbiani, who, in an old episode of Friends somehow convinced himself that he could speak perfect French. Ink fact, I don't know why I've even bothered describing my trauma; I could simply have posted this clip of Joey in action instead. The only mistake I didn't make, I think, was using 'tu' instead of 'vous'. After an unfortunate incident at a conference several years ago when I nearly started another war between France and Britain by tutoyer-ing someone, I stick to 'vous' whenever speaking French. Even my good friends in Paris are, on the very rare occasions when I speak to them in their language, 'vous'. (Jacques Derrida noted in his elegy for Jean-François Lyotard that, although the two men knew each other well for many years, they never progressed to 'tu'. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for moi.) Everyone is 'vous' to me, and I long for the day when the English language rediscovers a formal equivalent. We misanthropes need a 'you' that keeps people at a distance, I feel. Only Larry David, who regularly addressed the audience as 'you people' during his stand-up years, has come close in this respect.

My sense of general inadequacy during the visit to Paris was exacerbated by the effortless style of the inhabitants of the city and, more specifically, the staff at the universities. Having worked within British higher education for nearly a decade, I can assure you that an assembled mass of humanities scholars would be, in sartorial terms, something of a ragged, crumpled, ill-fitting, and egg-stained wasteland. With just a few notable exceptions, we're a scruffy, styleless mob. (I stress the notable exceptions because a few of my colleagues occasionally read Ink Quest. I am not, of course, referring to you here. You all have impeccabble style -- which is why you're readers of my blog, of course.) Someone once claimed, ink fact, that British philosophers were only opposed to the work of Jacques Derrida because he wore trousers that actually fitted. Everything is different in Paris, however. When the conversation became too technical and rapid for me to follow during part of the visit to the Sorbonne, my eyes wandered around the room. One man was wearing a yellow silk scarf over his shoulders with impossible grace. Its colour complemented his shirt and crisply knotted tie in a manner that no British man could ever manage. Another was dressed in a dark grey suit which must have been bespoke, as must his white silk shirt. The female members of staff, meanwhile, appeared to have been styled and dressed by Chanel, and I lost count of the number of Hermès scarves on show.

Most important of all, however, were the fine writing instruments on display around the room. It's true that there were a couple of rogue ballpoints, but these were negated by a wave of Mont Blanc fountain pens and propelling pencils, a Conway Stewart 58, a Waterman and a Cartier of some kind, and several other stylos plumes whose precise identity I couldn't determine from a distance. Meanwhile, one man had signed the dossier prepared by the department for the meeting with a nib so flexible and a flourish so flamboyant that his handwriting looked as if had stepped out of the eighteenth century.

In the end, that is to say, my ink and my fountain pen saved me from total inadequacy; here, if nowhere else, I held my own. I failed and blundered in everything except the only things that really count. As long as I have my stylo, I have at least an inkling of style haut.

Ink in use today: Private Reserve Burgundy Mist (a vivid, rich, expressive colour).

Break Ink Service

There will be a temporary break in service, I'm afraid, dear readers, as my precious iMac seems to be seriously ill. (I suspect Logic Board problems.) What's more, the Penquod sets sail for a short work trip to Paris next week. I hope to return soon with encre-dible, encre-oyable tales.

Ink in use today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Gloss Adjustment

T.S. Eliot was wrong: February is the cruellest month.

I say this because I have found a delightful colour of ink, but it lies just out of reach. No, it's worse than that: it sits in my ink box, but it's not really there. Like the troublesome note in Poe's 'The Purloined Letter', it is both in plain sight and hidden.

A book is to blame. After a brief shopping trip on Sunday afternoon, I sat down to write inside the books that I had just purchased. This is another one of my endlessly charming habits that drives the Inkette to distraction. For many years, I have conscientiously recorded inside the front cover of each new addition to my shelves my name, the date, and the city or town where the text was acquired. After all, a book collection is a record of a life -- I know of no better account of this than Walter Benjamin's beautiful 'Unpacking My Library' -- and so I treat my books as memories. I don't keep a diary (unless you count this blog), and I often forget to take photographs while travelling, so my books are keys to lost time.

I often find myself standing in front of the shelves, wondering, 'Where did I buy that?' or 'When did I finally track down a copy of this?' A brief glance at my annotation always provokes an 'Oh yes, of course'. Sometimes I don't need to open the covers to check, though, for certain books are bound eternally to specific days. For instance:

- Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities: 25 August 1992, San Francisco airport. I had just stepped off the plane from London at the beginning of a year's stay in California. Needing change for something or other, and only having large bills in my wallet, I bought Wolfe's book and broke a twenty at an airport news-stand. It's the ugly film tie-in version, complete with photograph of Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith on the front. I started to read it later that night in a worryingly cheap motel room on Mission Street in Santa Cruz, having just feasted on real Mexican food for the first time. But eating a large burrito when your jet-lagged body thinks it's something like 3.30am is not, I discovered, a good idea. I had to put Wolfe's book down and lie on the floor (which seemed to be cleaner than the bed) until the waves of nausea retreated.

- Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Don DeLillo's Valparaiso: the day after getting married in Las Vegas, 1999. (I'm not going to tell you the exact date; you already know too much about me.) The mere sight of these books brings back the taste of the banana muffins and strong coffee that we had for breakfast in the fake Greenwich Village in the New York, New York hotel. (Sorry, Stefan.)

- Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: three days before the birth of Baby Ink, Llantrisant (where, curiously, said creature subsequently popped into the world). As I reported at the time, I, in a moment of madness, actually took this book into the delivery room, just in case there was time for a spot of light reading.

- Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions: 31 August 2002, Strasbourg. This wonderful return to form hadn't appeared in the UK at the time, but I found a lonely American copy -- complete with those glorious rough-edged pages that US editions often have -- in the English-language section of FNAC. I was supposed to spend the next day at a conference at the university, but I hid in my hotel room and read the book in one sitting, pausing only when the cleaner knocked on the door and asked if she could come in with the 'aspirateur' (vacuum cleaner). I will forever link the word aspirateur, which was new to me then (seeing my puzzled expression, the cleaner pointed to the aspiring object), with Auster's novel.

Oh dear. I have been rambling. The floodgates of 'inkvoluntary memory' have been opened, and there's not a madeleine in sight.

To return to the present... In order to write the customary details inside the covers of my two new books, I picked up my Sailor Sapporo, which I'd filled with Omas Sepia earlier in the day. The nib touched the inside of the cover, and the beautiful ink eased out into the world. As I gazed fondly at the colour, however, something odd began to happen: the brown slowly but surely underwent a metamorphosis (Gregor!) into a mossy/olive green. I have tried to capture this splendid shade in the image displayed above, dear readers, but I fear that my camera cannot possibly do it justice.

It was then that I noticed the shiny surface of the cardboard used to bind the book. I have often known fountain pen ink to mutate upon contact with the glossy insides of greetings cards. And I am not alone in this, for my dear friend and fellow inkthusiast Eileen once tried to send me a written sample of her new Rohrer and Klingner Verdigris ink, but ended up having to point out that what I could see on the card, thanks to its shiny surface, bore little resemblance to the colour contained in the bottle.

I know too little about chemistry to explain this phenomenon, which I hereby name 'gloss adjustment'. But I do know this: I love what happens to Omas Sepia when it comes into contact with shiny card. I only wish that I could buy the mutated colour in a bottle for use on ordinary paper. (Would this hypothetical product simply become Omas Sepia if used on a glossy surface?) While I adore the authentic Omas Sepia, I have fallen in love with its secret double. (Should I call it Omas Vertigo?) There is a captivating genie inside the bottle, but merely opening the lid is not enough to release it. I can never predict when it will appear or how long it will stay. It tortures me from a distance, there but not there. I have taken a shine to a shade summoned only by shine.

Inks in use today: Noodler's FPN Galileo Manuscript Brown; Herbin Cacao du Brésil. (A brief note on the latter: I'm finding it hard to classify this colour. It's predominantly grey, but I can sometimes see a hint of smoky brown.)

Perish the Thought

It's perishing out there.

I'm not referring to the cold spell that has gripped many parts of Britain, dear readers, but to my new bottle of Herbin Cacao du Brésil ink. While I was out yesterday morning, Royal Mail tried to deliver the package containing the item, so I arrived home to find the usual 'Sorry, you were out' card on the mat.

Closer inspection of the note confirmed my ongoing persecution. First, the postman had written my details in ballpoint pen. There are few things that I hate more than seeing my precious name -- which is, I believe, because of my somewhat unusual surname, shared by no one else in the world -- scrawled in biro. Freud tells a story somewhere (I can't remember the precise location, but it's possibly in 'The Uncanny') about catching sight of an old man in front of him and being on the verge of speaking to the individual, but then suddenly realizing that the disagreeable figure is actually his own reflection in a pane of glass. It's always depressing when this happens -- I regularly find a tubby, potato-headed, scowling doppelgänger blocking my path -- but I find the sight of my own name in ballpoint ink even more crushing.

Second, and more significant, was the category ticked by the postman to describe the item that could not be delivered. As you can see from the picture displayed above, he had eight boxes from which to choose. He opted to leave his ballpoint smear in 'Packet'. I accept that a small box containing a bottle of ink could be described as a packet, but 'Perishable item' seems much more appropriate to me. I should think that this category tends to be reserved for delicate fresh flowers, food, and so on, but ink perishes as well. As all inkthusiasts know, the terrible fungus known only as 'SITB' (like 'Macbeth' or 'Yahweh', the full name cannot be uttered) may strike at any time. My fragile little bottle of Cacao du Brésil is, as I type these words and wait anxiously for the collection office to open, quietly perishing, slowly slipping away into that good night. (Rage, rage against the dying of the dyeing agent.) And with each limping step that it takes towards nothingness, a million new disposable ballpoint pens fly off the shelves and into the hands of mocking Royal Mail employees.

It turns out, though, that ballpoints are also perishing. In a wonderful moment of coincidence, honorary Penquod crew members Stefan and Hugh emailed me last week to bring to my attention ways in which dead biros are being recycled. Stefan had spotted the remarkable 'Din-ink' cutlery which transforms biro lids into knives, forks, and spoons. Inkterested parties can get the full scoop and see a picture by clicking here. Hugh, meanwhile, reported that a family outing to the Science Museum had led to the discovery, as part of an exhibition on a century of plastic, of a huge chandelier made from Bic pens. The second photograph displayed above (with Hugh's generous permission) shows the glory of this striking object.

I see a light at the end of the tunnel (emanating, perhaps, from a ballpoint chandelier). The reign of the ballpoint pen will perish if the hideous plastic object is used for activities other than writing. With this in mind, I am about to leave Ink Towers and make my way to the Royal Mail collection office, where I will suggest to the employees that they adopt fountain pens and travelling inkpots for their delivery routes. Their existing ballpoints, I will propose from my soapbox, can be kept in the canteen for use during the lunch break. If the workers fail to unite and rise up in the name of ink, I will request to opt out of the postal system, just as Kramer did in a memorable episode of Seinfeld. I don't care if this makes me a perisher. I'm ready to go underground and dance to the tune of the muted horn. W.A.S.T.E.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nightshade.