'Are we the baddies?'
I take this line from a sketch by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, in which two German SS officers suddenly experience a moment of enlightenment. 'Hans, I've just noticed something', says the one. 'Have you looked at our caps recently? [...] They've got skulls on them [...] Hans, are we the baddies?' Readers of Ink Quest not familiar with the routine can watch the whole thing here:
This sketch has been on my mind for the last couple of days, dear readers, because I have started to wonder if Ink Quest has spent nearly four years fighting on the side of evil, not against it.
My troubles began on Friday afternoon. My entire department had been sent to a conference room in a hotel for an 'Away Day'. (I won't bother to parody this event, as it managed to leap beyond parody all by itself.)
During one of the coffee breaks, I found myself in conversation with a colleague who grew up in Soviet-era Poland. We somehow got around to discussing ink (he brought the topic up, honestly), and he asked if my love of fountain pens went back to my school days. Was I, he asked, required to use an inkwell and dip pen while learning to write? I reported that I wasn't, and he then related how his schooling in Poland had been one filled with ink. (I don't know precisely when this was, but it must have been at some point in the 1960s, I think.) Each child's desk, he reported, sported an inkwell, and the caretaker would come around every day with a giant bottle of ink to replenish the containers. Learning to write, he added, was all about learning to dip a stylus-like pen into the inky depths.
I told him that this sounded like utopia, and I related how I'd been forced to use a ballpoint pen when learning to write in school. 'When I'm in charge', I said, 'those hideous creations will be banned.' What my colleague said next came as something of a shock.
Fountain pens, he announced in response to my desire to ban ballpoints, were prohibited in his Polish school. Not because, as I immediately suspected, they were the sign of capitalist, bourgeois decadence, but because they were believed to spoil children's handwriting. Only the dip pen, ran the rule, could produce proper writing. All hell broke loose, he continued, when his parents bought him a fountain pen and sent him to school with it. (I don't know my colleague well enough to know why and when he moved from Poland to the UK, but I wonder if his entire family was forced to seek political refuge here following the inkident in question. Were they sent into exile because he chose not to dip?)
I have always maintained that the ballpoint pen kills elegant handwriting. (Has anything but a simian scrawl ever been produced with a biro? The great Roland Barthes had it right when he remarked that a Bic was good for nothing but churning out 'pisse copie'.) But what if I've been wrong all along? What if the fountain pen -- the sacred instrument upon which Ink Quest relies -- is just as damaging? What if the only instrument capable of preserving the art of handwriting is the stylus-like dip pen?
In other words, I have been plunged into an exinkstential crisis. Perhaps I am one of 'the baddies'. Perhaps I have devoted nearly 350 posts to evil. Perhaps I've been on the wrong side from day one. Perhaps the Penquod should be sunk, the blog deleted without a trace, and all of my fountain pens thrown onto a bonfire. Perhaps we should let only the stylus style us. Which side am I on? I feel side-swiped.
Inks in use today: Diamine Chocolate Brown; Diamine Majestic Blue. (These two new acquisitions are delightful. With the Chocolate Brown, Diamine has finally come up with a proper dark brown. It's not quite as dark as, say, Noodler's Walnut, but it's getting there. It's similar to Private Reserve Chocolat, but I think it's slightly darker. The Majestic Blue, meanwhile, is a lovely saturated colour that reminds me very much of the mythical Parker Penman Sapphire. Both inks flow magnificently and offer some wonderful shading.)
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