Graphology

In hale times, I could inhale.

Devoted readers of Ink Quest may remember a post from March 2008 entitled 'Inkhalation', in which I detailed my struggle against a bout of bronchitis. Because the cough that Baby Ink generously donated to me last week had become familiarly painful overnight, I went to see my doctor this morning, expecting to be told that I have come down with the same illness again.

After listening to my lungs for a minute or two, the doctor declared that I do not have bronchitis; instead, some kind of viral infection has led to the wheeze-inducing inflammation of my airways. I have, as in March, been given an inhaler and an AeroChamber, but I have also been issued with a Mini-Wright Peak Flow Meter. This enticingly named object is, I now know, designed to monitor how much air is moving through my lungs. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, dear readers, I have to blow into the device three times, take the highest figure, and plot it onto the chart partially displayed above. After two weeks, I will take my little graph back to the doctor, who will determine if I have asthma, hypersensitive airways that fall feebly to their knees at the slightest sign of a cough, or something else altogether.

I always like to have a little project to occupy my spare time, so I'm quite happy to have two weeks of puffing and plotting ahead of me. (In a bizarre twist of fate, honorary Penquod crew member Arty, who's sadly been much more unwell than I have, is also on a 'puff and plot' programme, so we will clearly need to meet in a couple of weeks and compare graphs in order to see who's the weaker and the wheezier. He has already reminded me that the mighty Proust suffered from breathing difficulties, so I will, in honour of Marcel, be inhaling as much dust as possible over the next fortnight. For a long time I went to bed early and coughed myself silly.)

But there is, as usual, a problem: the paper on which I have to create my graph is too glossy to accept ink from a fountain pen. I have tried, but the lines simply will not dry. I don't know if I can bring myself to use a ballpoint pen, so I may soldier on with a real nib and place the graph beneath a hairdryer whenever I make a new mark. But what if the lines remain wet and get wiped away or mutated when I have handed the chart to my doctor for scientific analysis? What if my stubborn use of a fountain pen leads to the results of my test being spoiled? What if I end up being sent to the circus as The Man With the Weirdest Lungs on Earth?

To make matters even worse, I narrowly missed the chance to register an official complaint about the glossiness of the graph paper, for I was asked by the receptionist at the surgery to complete a short questionnaire about the practice while I was sitting in the waiting room. There was plenty of space to add a lengthy critique of the paper issued with the Mini-Wright Peak Flow Meter, but I had not seen the doctor or been given my prescription at this point, so I completed the survey and placed it in the allocated box without knowing what horrors lay ahead.

I write these words tonight, then, dear readers, in an ex-hale attempt to shout at the top of my lungs about the glossiness of the paper on which I have to plot my frailty. Why must the graph be at odds with graphology? What has the Mini-Wright got against the right to write right? Is the company secretly working with the ballpoint manufacturers of the world to make fountain pens and real ink expire? What kind of breathtaking wheeze have I stumbled across?

Ink failing to dry today: Herbin Café des Îles.

PS (29 October): Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan has just brought to my attention a recent article in the New York Times about how someone has figured out a way to capture a cough on film. Perhaps I should simply abandon the graph and submit a series of photographs to my doctor. ('Look -- I made a big cloud that morning, so I can't possibly be dying.')

Stuck Inside of Ink Towers with the Mobile Blues Again

'SIM card rejected'.

This is the message that greets me on the screen of my mobile phone when I pick it up this morning. I have no idea what it means or what to do about it, so I do what I always do when a piece of technology persecutes me: I switch it off, then switch it back on again. This appears to solve the problem, but I suddenly realize that I'm faintly disappointed that my phone is functional again. I was, it seems, hoping that the rejection of the SIM card was permanent.

I have, I believe, complained about the existence of mobile phones in many previous posts, and I've probably explained how it's in my manifesto that anyone with a novelty ringtone which blares on public transport will, when my revolution comes, be the first against the wall. And the wall will, of course, be fashioned out of the bodies of people who like to sit on trains near me and try out all eighty-five of the 'zany' ringing sounds that their phones can make.

I realize that these bleeping objects have their uses. But I think that they should also have their place. A text or a quiet call to say 'The train is running late. Can you collect the kids from school?' seems unproblematic to me, and I regularly use my phone to text outrageous gossip to colleagues when using the work email account would result in instant dismissal, but I genuinely believe that the end of Western civilization is nigh when every possible public space has been colonized by idiots grunting trivial and ungrammatical sentences into their handsets. Frank Bascombe captures the problem beautifully when he remarks, in Richard Ford's towering The Lay of the Land: 'The worse thing about others blabbing on their cell phones -- and the the chief reason I don't own one -- is the despairing recognition that everybody's doing, thinking, saying pretty much the same things you are, and none of it's too interesting.'

Unlike the heroic Frank Bascombe, I, of course, own a mobile phone -- mainly so that I can receive hourly phonecalls from the nursery to inform me that Baby Ink has, in yet another failed attempt to perfect parkour, fallen, bumped his head, and needed a cold compress -- but I resent its existence more with each new day. I would like to live without it and to be beyond the clutches of others, but, as Bob Dylan puts it in 'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again', 'deep inside my heart, I know I can't escape'.

It seems to me, however, that ink can help to drown out the eternal and infernal babble produced by mobile phones. With this in mind, I am writing more letters than ever before. Often, these are to fellow inkthusiasts and consist -- much to the Inkette's amusement -- of little more than lines like 'This is Noodler's Walnut. A bit darker than Standard Brown, don't you think?' But I have also started to use letters in the workplace, in situations where email would normally be expected. I have, for inkstance, recently been in touch for the first time with someone who's an expert on the work of Roland Barthes. Contact was inkitially established by a letter that I sent to this inkdividual's literary agent, and, while there have, it's true, been one or two brief emails since then, the correspondence has mainly unfolded in further letters. My heart skipped a beat when, in one of these missives, my correspondent, who was taught by petit Roland in Paris in the 1960s or 70s, referred in passing to the ink used by my great hero in his letters to her. I looked for the follow-up sentence that said 'And you are clearly Roland's heir', but she must have forgotten to add it.

Barthes, who died in 1980, never had the chance to send an email or speak into a mobile phone. And it appears to have done him no harm. While I can't give up completely either mode of communication -- I think that I'm contractually required, in what could be seen as technological terrorism, to have an email address at work -- I'm mobilizing ink and fountain pens in the war against stupidity and instantaneity. Mobile phones and email have encouraged a certain speed: we're expected to digest every message and response within minutes. Be quick, be casual, we're told. (I'm constantly amazed by how many intelligent people are happy to send out emails and text messages filled with typos. Everyone makes a mistake from time to time, but the virtually instant nature of electronic communication has apparently made errors in writing acceptable to most. Yes, I've mdae lops of mstakes, but loook how qiucjly I replie to you!!!'.)

I've had enough; I'm slowing things down with paper and ink. While others race around and fire off messages like bullets, I will sit at my desk, leisurely choose a pen and an appropriate ink, and write my responses by hand. I will happily watch the ink dry as the clock ticks away. We have had the Slow Food Movement; now it's time (well, in a while; let's not rush things) for the Slow Word Movement. Let us dawdle as we doodle. Let us reject our SIM cards. Slowly, very slowly, I am becoming a man of letters.

Ink in use today: Sailor Grey; Noodler's Walnut.

PS (24 October): After posting this entry yesterday, I found myself considering the purchase of a decadent silk pocket square, and I have since taken advice from honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, who passionately defends the art of the bow tie, on the matter. (The Inkette's sole thought was: 'So that you can make yourself look more stupid than usual, you mean?') It seems only fitting that a man who rants about the evils of modern technology be found with an anachronistic flourish of silk in the breast pocket of his suit. I have done a little research, and I'm delighted to find that the world of pocket squares is almost as diverse as that of fountain pens. There are, I have learnt, many different ways to fold one's square -- I find myself draw to the 'puff', predictably enough -- and fierce debates about the most suitable type of material. Excuse me while, 'puff' in pocket, I retire to register the blog Pocket Square Quest.

Diary of a Diary

I've always wanted to be an astronaut.

This probably has something to do with the moment at which I was born, for I trudged grumbling into the world less than two years after humans first walked on the moon. My forename, moreover, is one that became rather popular in the wake of the Apollo 11 mission, although my parents claim that they only chose it because they had a last-minute panic about 'Damian Colin'. (I'm not making this up.) Many of my toys and favourite books during childhood were space-related, and I have a vivid memory of my entire junior school sitting in the assembly hall on 12 April 1981 to watch a live television broadcast of the launch of the first space shuttle. I had to be told to sit down on several occasions, as I was desperate to be as close to the screen as possible.

I think I've left it too late to join NASA, however. And I believe that astronauts need to be good at maths, which I, as the previous entry of Ink Quest explained, am certainly not. 'Exploring outer space' will, then, join the ever-growing list of things at which I have failed. ('Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.')

What I didn't realize until this evening is that the space shuttle watched by me on a television screen in April 1981 was the same craft that disintegrated upon re-entry in February 2003, killing all crew members. I knew that the shuttle involved in the disaster was called Columbia -- I have another vivid memory of being in the car with the Inkette, driving back from a day out in Marlborough, when the news came on the radio -- but I had, for some inexplicable reason, never made the connection back to the Columbia of my childhood.

I made this discovery a couple of hours ago while following up a story that I heard on the radio in the early hours of the morning. One of the perks of being a parent of a young child is finding oneself scrambled for an urgent mission to heat up a bottle of milk or to reposition an errant 'taggie' in the small hours. (I suddenly feel like listening to John Martyn's 'Small Hours'. Has a song ever sounded more like its title?) Baby Ink usually sleeps through the night, but he decided to awake and start a small -- yet wildly effective -- riot at 2.10am today. After I had settled him with some warm milk, I went back to bed and, in an attempt to rediscover sleep, switched on the radio and tuned in to the BBC World Service.

Before long, Outlook came on. I usually switch off this show, as no misanthrope wants to listen to a programme whose slogan is 'Human stories from behind the global headlines'. To like 'human interest' stories, you need to have an interest in humans, I feel. But the description of an upcoming item caught my ear: it concerned pages from a diary belonging to one of the astronauts killed in the Columbia disaster.

I won't repeat the tale in full here; you can either listen to the episode of Outlook by clicking here (the item in question comes just over halfway through), or you can read a summary on this BBC webpage. But here, in a nutshell, is what I learnt as I listened.

Although all of the crew members were killed when the Columbia disintegrated, thirty-seven pages of the diary that one of the astronauts, an Israeli named Ilan Ramon, had been keeping while in space somehow survived and fell to earth in the United States. More specifically, in the kind of twist that could only occur in real life, they landed just outside a town named Palestine, Texas. To make things stranger still, those thirty-seven pages fell thirty-seven miles before reaching the ground, where they sat for two months -- in wind, rain, and sun -- before being discovered. Two pages of the diary -- which needed some restoration by forensic experts -- have just gone on display in Jerusalem. One features notes made by Ramon during his time in space; the other bears the Kiddush prayer said by Jews as a blessing over wine on the Sabbath.

It's a remarkable story, and the radio broadcast made things even more remarkable by having Ramon's widow read out a passage from the diary actually addressed to her, translating from the Hebrew as she went along. 'I love you, and good night' were the final words she spoke.

Perhaps because Outlook is about 'human stories', it said little about the diary itself. Yes, there was a discussion of how scientists spent many months piecing fragments together and using infra-red light or Photoshop to restore text that had disappeared. But what really mattered in the programme -- what served as its climax -- was the human angle. Now, I may be a cold and distant misanthrope, but even I would not suggest that the human angle here isn't poignant, touching, or that hearing Ramon's widow read the words of her dead husband wasn't a moving experience. The inkthusiast in me, however, was left wanting to hear about the paper and the ink used in the diary; there was a tale not told, a page left unturned, in other words.

Before you accuse me of writing in bad taste (again), let me be clear: I am not proposing that the World Service should have ignored Ramon's widow and spent ten minutes discussing nothing but paper and ink. I am, rather, simply saying that I wanted more than what was broadcast, and, to be precise, I wanted to be given detailed information about the brand of paper, the type of writing instrument(s) used, and, of course, the variety or varieties of ink employed. It's possible to find on the internet pictures of the two pages that have been exhibited in Jerusalem, but it's extremely hard to glean detailed inkformation from them. A recent article in The Guardian states that the diary was 'written in black ink and pencil', but gives no further clues. As fountain pens are prone to leaking in aeroplanes, I'm assuming that Ramon used some kind of rollerball or ballpoint, but this is guesswork. Without having access to the diary of the diary, I cannot be sure.

With all of this in mind, I am this evening launching the Penquod on a new mission. I will be writing to the BBC and demanding that a new programme be developed for the World Service. It will air after Outlook, will be called In(k)look, and will dedicate itself to the inhuman -- or, better still, inkhuman -- stories behind the global headlines. After the tales of human subjects, tales of inhuman objects. After the tears well, the inkwell.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Lexington Gray.

Mathematinks

I have figured it out.

I found myself this afternoon in a union meeting in the building that houses the Department of Mathematics. I've visited many of the buildings that make up the university, but until today I had never set foot inside this particular one. As I may have mentioned here in the past, I have a somewhat estranged relationship with the phenomenon of mathematics. I'm hopeless when it comes to numbers; even the simplest calculation is a struggle. I took 'O' Level Statistics in 1987, for instance, and got a 'D' (a failing grade in those days), then resat the examination after careful revision and got a 'U' (unclassifiable). And I remain wholly unconvinced of the apparent fact that 7+6=13; to me, the shapes 7+6 just look like they should result in a 14. In short, mathematics is -- a bit like the stock market, sport, and social interaction -- one of those things whose existence I reluctantly accept, but whose place in my daily life is less than zero. ('Maths=0-n, where n=any number', in other words.)

I felt a little uneasy crossing the threshold of the Mathematics Building this afternoon, then. I know what scholars and students in the humanities look like, but I had no idea of what to expect in this uncharted territory. Would I even be allowed into the building? Would the shibboleth I have to use each morning to enter my own building ('It's all subjective. Let's just make stuff up about stuff. If anyone from the government asks about transferable skills, just mumble something about "rigorous, independent thinking"') work at the doorway to the Mathematics Building? Would I need to recite pi to a thousand places or flash a calculator to make it past the gatekeeper?

In the end, I resorted to pretending to be in the middle of a complicated conversation on my mobile phone, and I timed my entrance so that I was just saying the words 'Ah, but what if you try e=mc squared' as I strolled past the porter. I was in. No one had got my number.

I was surprised to see that everything looked basically the same inside the land of mathematics. Until, that is, the union meeting got underway. While the finer points of the revolution were being plotted by my comrades, my eyes wandered to the chalk-board on the wall, where traces of a mathematics seminar remained. I simply do not have the words to describe what was displayed there; all I can tell you is that it wasn't words. I believe that there are things called 'equations', so perhaps it was one of those. Or maybe it was a 'formula'. Perhaps even a 'code'. Whatever it was, I could not understand a single part of it. It was just a series of scribbles to me. Signifiers without signifieds, as the great scribbler Roland Barthes says of his charming doodle that appears at the end of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Waves and radiation.

When I looked down at the sheet of paper in front of me some minutes later, I noticed that I had been doodling unconsciously. The sheet was now covered with pretty -- yet utterly meaningless -- lines of Herbin Cacao du Brésil ink. When I glanced back at the chalk-board, I realized that I had actually been reproducing some of the mathematical squiggles. (I hadn't succeeded in making them meaningful to myself, however; for all I know, I could have solved an equation that has baffled boffins for centuries.) Yes, dear readers: I had become a mathematinkian.

In that moment, the way forward presented itself to me. As regular readers of Ink Quest will know, I am just biding my time in my present job while I try to find another profession stupid enough to take me on. I have never really known where to go next, however ... but now I do. I am going to ask the university if I may be redeployed to the Department of Mathematics. I have no plans to learn anything about the discipline; instead, I will have the chalk-boards in the building covered over with Clairefontaine paper, and I will then stand at the front of my classes, fountain pen in hand, scribbling meaningless shapes. Every now and then, to maintain the illusion of expertise, I will point to a particular squiggle and say something like 'which makes the x integer less of a quantum than we once believed'. For once, my students will think that I am a genius. And I, of course, will be able to spend all day playing with inks and fountain pens. My number has finally come up. In sum, it's all beginning to add up.

Inks used in complex equations today: Herbin Cacao du Brésil; Sailor Grey.

Stet

The edict is 'edit'.

I have spent most of the week ruthlessly hacking away at my own precious words with a series of fountain pens and inks. Not the words posted here, dear readers, but those making up the draft of a dull, pointless academic book that I'm required to produce in order to justify my existence with the ivory tower. I have given five years of my life to this troublesome tome, ink fact, and I have, now that the final rewriting is well underway and the end is in sight, reached the point where burning the entire manuscript seems like the only sensible thing to do.

I know that I shouldn't complain. I know that I'm fortunate to be paid a fairly decent salary to live a life that often resembles the one described by the reclusive writer E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.

I'm never happier than when I'm turning sentences around, but my problem at present is that I've reached a point where I no longer know what needs turning around. Ink fact, I've cut huge sections of a particularly bothersome chapter this week, simply because I felt that the sentences could not be turned around, could not be saved. I believe that the relevant section of the book is now clearer, but I can't help thinking about the months of work that went into the pages that have been scrapped. No reader will ever know what was cut, will ever see the invisible paragraphs. On reflection, who am I fooling? No one is ever going to read a single word of this tedious drivel. Let it gather dust and turn to dust.

I've been trying to cope with the trauma by enjoying the nibs and inks with which I've been turning sentences around and, in my more savage moments, striking bold lines through jettisoned paragraphs. (I have rarely had second thoughts and turned to the restorative 'stet'; much more common in the margins has been a weary 'Cut! Rubbish!') Diamine Indigo came in very handy on Wednesday: its firm tint made light work of phrases whose utter awfulness made me hang my head in shame. And the dusty glory of Herbin Poussière de Lune -- a colour that I have tragically neglected in recent months -- almost restored my faith in the entire project as it flowed onto the pages and turned sentences around yesterday morning.

But the editing has been made harder by the arrival, at the beginning of the week, of the new Bob Dylan CD, Tell Tale Signs, which is made up of outtakes from albums released between 1989 and 2006. Not only have I wanted to spend every waking moment listening to the songs, but I've often found myself wondering what on earth led Dylan to cut certain things from albums before their release. The highest point of Tell Tale Signs, for instance, is 'Red River Shore', an epic piece that was recorded for Time Out of Mind, but then discarded. The little booklet that comes with the 2-CD release (I'm not stupid enough to shell out for the insanely overpriced 3-disc version) notes that one of the musicians who played on Time Out of Mind was astonished to discover that Dylan had ended up leaving 'the best song off the record'. I don't quite agree with that description -- largely because the album contains what is probably my favourite Dylan song of all, 'Not Dark Yet' -- but I do share the incredulity. (If, inkidentally, you've never heard 'Not Dark Yet', you can watch the first clip below; don't bother looking for 'Red River Shore' on YouTube, though, as the only version found there is the inferior second take. Oh, and if you happen to be of the opinion that Bob Dylan cannot sing or should never have gone electric, the second clip is for you. Play it ******* loud.) How, I've wondered as I've listened to 'Red River Shore' over and over again while redrafting and cutting my purple prose, could something so majestic have been cut, edited out?

I'm not suggesting for one moment that anything I've cut from my magnum hopeless is worth keeping for a future moment. And even to mention my back pages in the same sentence as the exquisite 'Red River Shore' is akin to sacrilege. But I can't help wondering if I'm striking inky lines through the best bits. What if the passages that remain are really the ones that should have been excised? What if, to quote one of the greatest episodes of Seinfeld, 'every instinct I have in every aspect of life -- it's all been wrong'. Should I, like George Costanza, actually be doing the opposite of what I believe to be right? Is the ink being used in all the wrong places? Do I need to correct the corrections? Do I need to subject my entire history of judgement to a giant 'stet'?

(Editor's note: This entry of Ink Quest has been assembled from scraps of Clairefontaine paper discovered floating in the sea. It appears that they were thrown in a fit of despair from the deck of a large, clumsy, rudderless ship called the Penquod at some point in the week beginning 6 October 2008. Witnesses report hearing the phrase 'Serenity now!' shouted several times before the paper fluttered down to the waves. Chemical analysis suggests that the inks in use at the time were Herbin Poussière de Lune and Diamine Indigo.)

Et ink Arcadia ego

I have been drowning in honey, but not in ink.

I can't really explain my fondness for Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Its central themes -- Catholicism, aristocracy, Englishness -- are ones about which I know and understand very little, and it's extremely rare that an example of British fiction will catch my eye. Perhaps it's the elegiac misery, the hopeless sense of loss and lost time, that appeals to me. Or perhaps it's a personal nostalgia that draws me to the nostalgic novel: like many British people over the age of thirty, I have clear memories of the epic (659-minute) television adaptation that first aired in 1981, when I was around ten years old. Above all, I remember watching the first episode on the sofa with my grandmother while my parents were out. What strikes me as strange now, over a quarter of a century later, is that she was just three years younger than Evelyn Waugh; even stranger is the thought that she would have been younger than I am today during the period depicted in Brideshead Revisited. She died over a decade ago ('Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes'), so I can't ask her about what drew her to the television screen in 1981, but I should like to take a moment to thank her for having the foresight to allow her young grandson to stay up late and watch a tale of adultery, alcoholism, homoeroticism, guilt, jealousy, and feckless foppery.

It was with some interest, then, that I went to the cinema last night to see the new adaptation of Waugh's novel. There has been a great deal of discussion of the film in the British press in recent weeks. We have been told, among other things, that this season's look is 'pure Brideshead', that the effete fop is back ('But he never went away in Ink Towers', I have cried in response from my gondola), that things must, if Sebastian Flyte has returned, be as bleak in Gordon Brown's Britain as they were under Thatcher in the early 1980s, and that liberties have been taken with Waugh's novel. It's true that a lot has been lost in the passage from page to screen, but it's also true that the filmmakers didn't, unlike the producers of the 1981 television series, have the luxury of a 659-minute running time.

There is, however, a much more serious omission from the film: fountain pens. I don't remember any moments in Waugh's novel where a nib or an inkwell is mentioned, but the latest adaptation is obsessed far more than the source text by objects from the period in which the tale is set. There are beautiful, seductive close-ups of cufflinks, cigarette cases, gloves, shoes, jewellery, ties, waistcoats, and shaving brushes, but not, unless I missed something, a single shot of a vintage fountain pen or a brimming bottle of ink. There was one moment where my hopes were raised: a blank sheet of elegant paper filled the screen, and a writing instrument entered the shot ... but, alas, it was just a pencil.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the parade of beautiful objects -- ink fact, their tale was more captivating than that of the human characters -- I left the cinema feeling that the absence of writing instruments and ink was deeply disappointing. The film captures very well, particularly in its first half, the casual decadence of privileged life at Oxford, but I find it hard to believe that Sebastian -- who is seen peeling plovers' eggs at one point -- wouldn't have had a luxurious fountain pen and a crystal inkwell in his room, which Waugh's novel refers to as being 'filled with a strange jumble of objects'. We're also told in the novel that Flyte sends his note of apology to Charles 'written in conté crayon on a whole sheet of my choice Whatman H. P. drawing paper'. Wouldn't such an aesthete also have a rich nib and a selection of sumptuous inks at his fingertips? If you're going to drown in honey, you need a bottle of ink around your ankle to keep you submerged.

As soon as it's morning in Hollywood, I will be telephoning Harvey Weinstein and suggesting that yet another adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel be put into development. This time, the 'strange jumble of objects' will inklude fountain pens, quills, and an array of bottles of ink. Perhaps Aloysius will have a small ink stain upon his paw. Brideshead will be revisited.

Inks held barely aloft by limp wrist today: Sailor Grey; Rohrer and Klingner Alt Bordeaux (one for Sebastian); Diamine Indigo.

PS (3.10pm): Honorary Penquod crew member Eileen, who has spent time of her own 'drowning in honey' in Oxford, has emailed to inform me that fountain pens can definitely be found in the 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, for which, it transpires, she also has a fondness. She has pointed me in the direction of the following clip:



(The pen appears at around the 4:40 mark.)

Ronink

The streets are paved with ink.

Accounts of someone else's dreams are deeply tedious; they usually send me straight to sleep, in fact. But you are reading post number 301 of a grumpy, bitter, misanthropic blog about the quest for the perfect ink, so my guess is that you're not easily bored. I will, therefore, share with you a recurrent, ink-themed dream that I've been having in recent weeks. Feel free to doze off at any point.

I am in a city. It's never named, and it never resembles any actual city that I've visited, but it always looks the same. I have been told that a shop selling exquisite inks and pens can be found on the other side of the town, and so I set off eagerly in its direction. But I never actually get there, for something always distracts me along the way. Last night it was a little secondhand bookshop, in which I browsed for so long that the sun went down and all of the city's businesses closed for the night. A week or two ago a bagelry that also sold wonderful coffee was to blame. The dream always end with my realizing that it's too late to buy ink and that I will have instead to wander aimlessly through the streets. I inevitably wake up feeling disappointed. (Actually, that happens whether or not I've had the dream in question.)

Freud tells us that a dream articulates a desire which can't directly see the light of day; because the wish is somehow unacceptable, perhaps even shocking, it has been repressed to the unconscious, from where it none the less returns in a veiled form (a dream, a slip of the tongue, a mistaken action, and so on). The lid always gets blown off the id.

I have been trying to make sense of my ink-starved dream for the last few weeks. Until this morning, I had made no headway. Now, however, I may be getting somewhere. Last night's reverie came at the end of a day in which I had, thanks to the ending of a period of research leave, to give my first lecture for roughly ten months. And I was thrown straight back in at the deep end: as the hands of the clock reached 2.10pm, I looked up from the lectern to see 180 new first-year students sitting in front of me and demanding to be entertained.

Some of my older colleagues who lived through Thatcher's devastating cutbacks in the 1980s insist that those lucky enough still to be with jobs in higher education shouldn't publicly complain about daily life in academia. 'Just be thankful that you have a job' seems to be the mantra. While there's something in this, I like nothing better than complaining about my profession, however ungrateful it may appear. Yes, there are many benefits (leaking, asbestos-filled buildings; staff car parks for which staff have to pay; bureaucrats who decide that the list of courses taken by a student will officially be known as the student's 'diet'; sandwiches that have apparently been boiled for a week before being presented for sale), but I have come to realize over time that I really am in the wrong line of work.

It's often said that academic life has three components: teaching, research, and administration. The only one that I genuinely enjoy is the second. The endless administrative tasks dreamed up by the mediocracy make me want to impale my own head on a sharpened biro, and teaching is perhaps best defined as timetabled anxiety. This is not a predictable complaint about students, many of whom are pleasant and eager to learn; it is, rather, simply a comment about my unbelievable stupidity in choosing a job that involves interaction with people. What was I thinking? I don't want to talk to people, and they're certainly not going to learn anything from listening to me.

These very thoughts were running noisily through my head as I rustily gave my lecture yesterday afternoon. 'Don't write this down -- it's rubbish!', I nearly cried at one point, while at another moment I came very close to saying, 'It would probably be better if we all went home now; I have nothing of consequence to offer'. And when the students came up with wonderful answers to my questions, I simply concluded that, as they clearly knew the answers, they really didn't need me. ('Nothing to be done.') Even though they've only been at the university for a week, I sent them all straight to graduation.

My dream of strolling in search of ink came some hours after this fiasco, and I think that there must be a connection. Isn't the dream an articulation of a desire to be able to spend all my time wandering aimlessly, stopping off for a bagel, an espresso, or a bottle of ink whenever I feel like it, finally freed from the demands of my job? Isn't the disappointment that I feel on waking from the dream actually a reference to my dis-appointment, to my departure from my present appointment? Isn't it clear that what I really want is to be a Ronink, an inky-fingered inkarnation of a Japanese Ronin who wanders alone, without master, beyond the law? If I remember correctly, a Ronin, more specifically, was a samurai who broke the code of honour by refusing to commit hara kiri upon the demise of his master. This led to deep disgrace, distance, and persecution. Sounds about right to me.

Inks in use on disgraced wanderings today: Noodler's Nightshade; Herbin Lie de Thé.

PS (10.20am) -- This Ronink is not alone: I have just received an email from honorary Penquod crew member Eileen, who has also just returned to regular university life after a period of research leave. Like me, she is currently deeply traumatized and longing for a return to inky isolation, to days when there is nothing to do but choose an ink, think, and write. And it would seem that she is more intent than I on bringing Ronin-like disgrace upon herself, for she has confessed to having a crush on Sarah Palin.