Inkdex

Ink, again, is an index to death.

Mortality, as regular readers of this jaunty blog will know, is never far from my thoughts, but it feels closer than usual today. This is not just because the news has been filled with reports of the sad loss of John Updike. (Like Nicholson Baker, author of the magnificent tribute to Updike, U and I, I cannot claim to have read all of the author's books. But what I have read, I have loved, especially the Rabbit novels and 'Rabbit Remembered', the brief story-length epilogue set after the hero's death.) No, dear readers, death has been brought near today by ink and a piece of card.

One of my tasks for the day was to write a reference (I believe that Ink Quest's many American readers will know such a thing better as a letter of recommendation) for a former student of mine. I probably write between fifty and hundred of these for different people in the course of a year, so it's a perfectly routine activity. Well, usually. Because the student in question graduated something like a decade ago, his record card -- to which I wanted to refer in order to check his grades -- is no longer kept in the main departmental offices; I was, rather, required to walk further down the corridor to the somewhat mysterious room where all of the older cards are filed in several large cabinets.

Even though I have been teaching in the department for around ten years, I have never, until today, had occasion to delve into this dusty archive. As soon as I opened the drawers and started searching for the card, I found myself floating freely across history, for the archived items are not stored by graduating year; they're simply alphabetized in one giant ahistorical sequence, so it's possible while flicking through, say, the records for former students whose surnames begin (or began -- a distinction to which I will return) with 'A' to see faces and names from any year going back to something like the late 1940s. (The university is older than that, but I saw no cards from earlier periods.)

When I eventually found the card I needed, I removed it from the drawer, but it somehow attached itself to its neighbour, which meant that I suddenly found myself looking at a photograph of a student who entered the university in 1951. The first thing I noticed about the picture was how well dressed the individual was. His hair was slicked down, he was cleanly shaven and smiling politely, and he wore an elegant suit and tie. For a brief moment, I wondered if I was looking at a member of the cast of Brideshead Revisited. It is almost impossible to imagine a male student of 2009 dressing so formally for the photograph to be handed over to the department on enrolment. I'm far too old to know how to describe the student fashions of today, but I can at least see that they're usually as informal as possible. In many cases, the idea seems (to my wrinkled and squinting eye) to be to look as nonchalant and ungroomed as possible on the record card. (I got the grades you required of me, but don't expect me to shine my shoes or shave my face, mister. I'm stickin' it to The Man all the way to graduation.)

When I'd got over the shock of the picture, I noticed the ink and the handwriting that had, over half a century ago, recorded the student's details and performance in examinations. They were both, in short, things of utter beauty. The letters were immaculately formed, vivacious, precisely linked, and instantly conjured up a period when proper penmanship was prized in British schools. The ink, meanwhile, was a gorgeously deep blue-black that showed no signs of weathering. I can think of no modern blue-black with the same kind of quiet nuance.

My first thought was to ask a more senior member of the department to whom the handwriting belonged. But I quickly realized that, if the striking letters had been formed fifty-eight years ago, none of my colleagues could possibly know the answer to the question. And then it really hit me: the person who had made such delightfully lively inky marks upon the piece of card is almost certainly no longer among the living. Even if the individual was a recently appointed junior lecturer in 1951, he or she must have been close to thirty at the time. (I suspect, however, that the maker of the marks was older than that, for the style of the letters reminds me of grandmother's handwriting, and she would be 103 if she were alive today.)

This bristle of mortality led me to wonder about the student whose name and photograph adorned the card. If he was eighteen years of age in 1951 (is that when people became university students back then, or did National Service come first?), he would now be seventy-six. That's not really ancient by modern standards, so there's a chance that he's still out there somewhere, still dressing like a true gentleman, still looking back fondly at his university years. Even if he is, though, there was something rather unsettling about looking at the photograph of his youthful face. That frozen, voiceless moment from nearly sixty years ago is all I will ever see, all I will ever know. What happened next is a mystery. I wouldn't know him if I passed him in the street tomorrow, for I am only familiar with his face as it was in 1951. The photograph has removed him from the frame of life.

Surrounded by all of this death, of course, the blue-black ink sat mocking. Unlike the subject whose name it formed upon the index card, unlike the owner of the pen from which it flowed, it is -- fire and floods aside -- immortal. And that undying quality merely underscores the mortality of the student and the writer. You can run, rabbit, but you can't hide. All human fingers turn to dust, and ink remains the index.

Ink used for epitaphs today: Omas Sepia.

PS (29 January): They keep on dropping this week. I read a few moments ago that John Martyn has followed John Updike into the nothingness. Just as I have not read all of Updike's books, I have not heard all of Martyn's albums, but Solid Air has long been one of my favourites, and 'Small Hours' (from One World) does sublime things with an acoustic guitar, an echo unit, and a volume pedal. All love songs should, I feel, contain the line, 'Say you'll be my ruin':

Panoptinkon

My inkconscious has been busy.

While I was asleep last night, my unconscious mind made it perfectly clear that it was not entirely happy with yesterday's Ink Quest post. 'Could do better', it said, 'and here's how'.

In my dream, the details of which are still a little vague, I was working on the entry about pen badges, but when I got to the part about how compelling everyone to wear brooches signalling their preferred writing instruments would not work, I came up with a miraculous solution: panoptinkism.

Panopticism, as many of you probably already know, dear readers, was made famous by Michel Foucault, who, in a chapter of Surveiller et punir (a book known as Discipline and Punish in English), carefully scrutinized the implications of the panopticon, a prison designed (but not actually built) by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. This startling construction consisted of a central tower, in which the prison guards would be housed, and a surrounding circle of cells, each of which ran the entire width of the ring and thus could have windows on both the inner and outer walls. (I realize that I'm not describing this very well, so you might wish to consult the account given here. Alternatively, just picture a ring doughnut with a matchstick standing up in the middle. The doughnut is the cells, and the matchstick contains the guards.)

Bentham's structure -- and this is something discussed at length by Foucault -- ensured that the prisoners were visible at all times and, crucially, that the guards remained unseen. If you were unlucky enough to find yourself in a light-drenched cell, you would never know if you were being watched at any given moment (or even, more strikingly, if the tower contained an observer). Panopticism, Foucault argued, changes the way that those subjected to its gaze behave: because people never know for certain if they're being watched, but because it's being watched is always a possibility, they act as if they're always under surveillance. Discipline has become internalized; the human body, once mutilated by chains and guillotines, is now made docile by nothing more than the threat of vision. (For a fascinating account of how modern Los Angeles operates along precisely these lines, incidentally, see Mike Davis' City of Quartz.)

But what does all of this have to do with ink and badges in the shape of fountain pens? Well, dear readers, you will recall that my previous post ultimately rejected the wearing of pen-shaped badges because of the potentially sociable outcome: if I come out as an inkthusiast and wear my allegiance on my lapel, there's always the risk that strangers with similar interests will approach me and strike up conversation. But perhaps my inkconscious mind, by dreaming of Bentham's panopticon, has come up with a clever solution: panoptinkism.

In short, I'm locking myself in the tower at the centre of the panoptinkon. Everyone else will be required to wear badges identifying their choice of writing instrument, and I'll be able to scrutinize these as I move around the world, but I will wear nothing on my lapel. I will, in other words, be invisible, anonymous, immune to vision. As Foucault puts it, 'in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen'. And if I can't be seen, no one can attempt to draw me into the netherworld of social inkteraction, but I will be at liberty to pass harsh judgement on those around me. For me, it's a case of inkvisibility; for everyone else, it's a matter of ink-visibility and 'cell: la vie'.

Inks possibly in use in the tower today (how would you ever know for certain?): Noodler's Stockholm Indigo; Noodler's La Reine Mauve; Omas Blue.

The Pen Badge of Courage

Brooch: the subject.

I've been reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland this week, dear readers, and I have to say that I'm a little disappointed. When the novel was published last year, it was widely praised as the first truly great post-9/11 American novel (even though the author is actually Irish); some even went so far as to say that it gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money. I'm not so sure. Yes, there are some delightfully elegant moments, but there are also points where the prose creaks a little, and some of the 'Look, this is a metaphor!' and 'Isn't the Chelsea Hotel a zany place?!' sections caused me to wrinkle my nose in deep disapproval.

When I'd finished the book, I casually flicked through the interviews with the author that are included at the end of the British paperback edition. And it was here that I spotted something which might explain why, for me, the book is uneven. O'Neill is asked at one point if he writes with a pen or a computer. 'Laptop', he simply replies.

If I'd known this beforehand, I would perhaps not have bothered with the novel, for it seems to me that truly graceful, perfectly polished prose can only be produced by a pen (by which I mean a fountain pen, of course). To type straight onto a screen is to miss a crucial inky part of the process of composition -- if you haven't wrestled with the ink, you haven't written -- and to type straight onto the screen of a laptop is as bad as it gets. I have, quite simply, never understood the appeal of these ever-shrinking portable machines, which should, I think, in the light of Netherland's weaknesses, be confined to the smouldering fires of the nether regions. If you want a computer, at least have the decency to commit to it by clearing space for a desktop machine. Laptops, for me, say 'I want a computer, but I want it to be so small and so flat that I don't have to think about it'. (As much as I Iove Apple computers, I find the Macbook Air beyond comprehension. Why would I spend over £1200 on something that's essentially immaterial? If I want a slim box of air, I'll go to the garage and attach an empty pizza carton to the tyre hose, thank you very much. How long will it be before computer manufacturers launch a laptop that's actually measured in minus centimetres? Yeah, this one's 50000 gig and it's actually negative in width. Can you have a look at one? No, I'm afraid you can't: you'd need to be in the fifth dimension to get a glimpse of this baby.)

As I looked at the moody photograph of Joseph O'Neill inside the back cover of Netherland, I found myself wishing that he'd been wearing something clearly to identify him as a 'writer' who 'writes' on a laptop. A badge, maybe. Perhaps, I thought, it could simply take the form of a little picture of a portable computer. And whenever I then saw I picture of an author with an image of a laptop pinned to his or her lapel, I would know that I could simply discard his or her work.

It was at around this time that I happened to receive a message from a fellow member of the Fountain Pen Network, in which the existence of a company called Wm Spear Design was brought to my attention. If you click here or here, dear readers, you will see that this firm produces, among other things, small brooches/badges/pins in the shape of fountain pens. Perhaps, I then began to think, every member of the human race should be forced to wear a badge to identify his or her writing instrument of choice. Yes, I know what you're thinking: we've been here before with pink and yellow triangles, and look where that ended. But bear with me for a moment: I'm not proposing to exterminate or oppress those wearing the 'wrong' badges; I simply want to know who writes with what. I want ink to be out in the open. (Well, okay, perhaps I would turn a blind eye to the persecution of anyone caught wearing a ballpoint badge. If you're stupid enough to own up in public to being a fan of the biro, you deserve everything you get.)

But, as usual, my magnificent plans soon came crashing down around me. As I was on the verge of ordering a brooch in the shape of a fountain pen from Wm Spear Design, I realized that wearing such an item in public could possibly draw other inkthusiasts towards me. They might, I thought, even try to strike up friendly conversation. As I have no desire to talk to people, as I spend my life trying to get through the day without having to engage in idle chit-chat, a badge in the shape of a fountain pen and with such potentially social properties could be disastrous. (I'm already a bit anxious about attending the forthcoming South-West Pen Show in Bristol next month, and I was more than a little alarmed to see that members of the Fountain Pen Network are being invited to wear -- yes, you guessed it -- badges in order to 'encourage plenty of socialising'. I think that I'm going to be attending the event with honorary Penquod crew member Eileen, so perhaps I can use her as a shield or get Grover, her delightful West Highland Terrier, to attack anyone who comes near us.)

Having broached the subject, then, I fear that brooches are not the way forward. My lapel will remain without label. I will not, after all, be spending my pin-money on pins.

Inks in use today: Noodler's Stockholm Indigo; Noodler's La Reine Mauve. (These two colours have just arrived from Seattle, courtesy of honorary Penquod crew member Anna. They're both very pleasant and well-behaved inks: the Indigo is a sensible and permanent blue, while the Reine Mauve is a striking purple that flows very freely.)

1911

Eee! Oh! Eleven.

1911 is the number of the day, dear readers. While lying in bed listening to the radio in the wee small hours (yes, Baby Ink is still unwell), I discovered that the online version of the 1911 census for England and Wales has just been launched. With a few clicks and for a few pounds, people are now able to consult digitized versions of the original handwritten census returns completed by their ancestors. Some hours later, excited about the possibility of seeing the kind of ink used by my relatives nearly a century ago, I decided to search the census for entries relating to my parents' parents, who would have been young children at the time. (My maternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather were both born in 1906, for instance.) I have a somewhat unusual surname -- its strange spelling is rumoured to be the work of an eccentric relative who, in the dim and distant past, woke up one morning and decided to add an extra letter to the family name -- so I felt sure that it would take just seconds to track down ancestors on my father's side.

I was wrong. Very wrong, in fact, for I could find no reference whatever in the census to anyone with my surname or my maternal grandmother's maiden name. At first, I felt liberated: I have often longed to be invisible and hailed by no culture, and it seemed to me for a few minutes that having no recorded ancestors is a good first step on the road towards disappearance. (I have already done future relatives of mine a favour by refusing to register my American marriage with the British authorities. 'It's optional', I was told by someone at the Home Office. 'If you choose to record it over here, people tracing family trees in years to come will be able to track you down more easily. Most people opt to register overseas marriages for this very reason.' I opted not to. For that very reason.)

But then I became suspicious. Does the daily persecution that I suffer at the hands of the modern world have roots stretching back to the early years of the twentieth century? Were my grandparents, although mere children, deliberately excluded from the 1911 census? Did the state decide that they simply were not worth counting?

TELEGRAM
From: Census processing office, London
To: Census HQ, deep bunker 5
Subject: Undesirables
Date: 16 September 1911

Have received submissions from two families who will eventually unite and produce the author of Ink Quest STOP Spelling of one family's name of possibly lunatic origin STOP This office believes that the nation would be wise not to acknowledge the existence of either dynasty STOP Please confirm that census can be 'sexed down' accordingly STOP

Intrigued, I consulted the 'Why can't I find my ancestor?' section of the census website, where I read the following:

Because the documents transcribed were handwritten by each individual head of household there is a wide variety in the quality and condition of the writing. There are inevitably some errors in the transcription of the census, which result in spelling errors, although the 1911 census has exceeded the accuracy target of 98.5 per cent. If you see an error in the transcription you can report it via the ‘report error’ button on the transcript page.

Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan probably has a strong sense of déja vu at this point, for he recently found himself battling against the Ellis Island record office over an incorrect transcription of his family name on the document that (if I remember correctly) recorded the arrival of his father in the United States from Italy. But at least Stefan could find an incorrect record; my ancestors appear simply not to have existed.

I wonder if ink is somehow to blame. As I believe I have noted in previous posts, I have terrible handwriting. I can read it (well, most of the time), but others regularly find it utterly impossible to decipher. (I think that the secretaries where I work rank my scrawl as the second worst in the department; a distinguished professor with a magnificently impenetrable hand wears the crown of crowns, but I am quietly counting the days until he retires.) Perhaps I have simply inkherited the inkability to be legible from my inkvisible ancestors. Perhaps the head of each household from which I am descended was so sloppy, so cavalier with the ink that the census returns were impossible to decipher. Perhaps, ink other words, I am descended from a long (and wonky) line of scrawlers.

I fear that I will never know. I have tried inputting variant spellings and 'wildcards', but the census website has revealed nothing. With this in mind, I have been writing today with my suitably named Sailor 1911 fountain pen. Its extremely fine Japanese nib forces me to form my letters carefully, precisely, and -- dare I say it? -- almost legibly. (Give me a broad Music nib, on the other hand, and, to quote Seinfeld's Kramer, 'There's nothing holding me in place. I'm flipping, I'm flopping...') The inkvisibles are rising up. I am one who -- oh! -- shuns '11. We will be counted from now on. You will know us by our names. (Oh, wait...) You may not be able to see us, but you will be able to sense us.

Ink in precise use today: Noodler's Walnut.

Inkheart

I am the real Inkheart.

I have received two emails this week on the subject of Inkheart, the new Hollywood blockbuster about a man who has the ability to make characters in books come to life. In the first, my colleague Daphne asked if I have been to see the movie. (I haven't.) In the second, a fellow member of the Fountain Pen Network -- let's call him Ike, shall we, dear readers? -- remarked that he saw the title of the film and assumed that it was the story of my life.

It isn't, of course -- for that, see seasons 1-6 of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- but I have decided to make the title my own, for it seems that the Inkheart currently playing at a multiplex near you has very little to do with ink. I, by way of contrast, have a heart that endlessly draws me to ink, sometimes without my even being aware of it.

I will give you an example, dear readers. Baby Ink has been ill again this week, so has been at home with me for the last couple of days. He seemed to be feeling a little better yesterday afternoon, so I took him out for a short walk. Not long after he'd tried to pick my pocket (he'd been fascinated with the way that money came out of the ATM, and I then caught him, while I was holding him in my arms as we waited to cross the road, slipping his little hand inside my coat and towards my wallet), we called into a newsagent to buy a paper. It was at this point that my inkheart unconsciously swung into action, because, for no particular reason, I lowered him down to the floor once we were inside the shop. He ran straight to the children's magazine section and grabbed a copy of the publication sold to further the rule of Peppa Pig, one of his favourite cartoons. I tried to reason with him -- 'Look, let's ask them to order Pen World for you instead' -- but he won the battle, and 'Peppa's Official Magazine!' was carried triumphantly out of the shop in his tiny hand.

When we got home a few minutes later, he urged me to open the plastic packet on the front of the magazine. (I make it sound as if he put in a polite written request; he simply pointed and shouted 'There! There!' until I obliged.) I hadn't paid any attention to the 'FREE GIFT!' attached to Peppa until this point, and I suddenly realized that I had both made a terrible mistake and unwittingly struck ink. I had made a mistake because the toy was made up of pieces far too small for a child of less than two years of age. (Indeed, when I read the extremely small print at the bottom of the cover -- and I'll come back to this small print in a moment -- I saw that three is the recommended minimum age.) But I had simultaneously struck ink because the toy inside the plastic wrapper was a tiny rubber stamp -- of Peppa, naturally -- and ink pad.

I was, therefore, faced with a terrible dilemma:

- Protect son by refusing to allow him to play with the toy, but risk turning him into an ink-phobic ballpoint user later in life

OR

- Endanger son's life by sitting and reading the newspaper while he discovers the pleasures of ink ... but hovers on the verge of choking to death on tiny plastic objects.

In the end, I deconstructed the binary opposition (I knew that all those years of reading the work of Jacques Derrida would come in handy one day) by letting him handle the objects under strict supervision, and then pulling that old parents' classic: the distraction manoeuvre. Yes, dear readers, I waited for him to turn away from the stamp and ink pad for a moment, and I then said 'Oh, look!' in an excited tone and thrust a different toy into his hands. He immediately forgot all about the hazardous materials, which were quickly whisked to a shelf far beyond his reach.

My ink-drawn heart is clearly a force to be reckoned with. No matter how hard I consciously try to be a good parent, it exerts a dangerous, unconscious inkfluence upon me. I had no conscious reason for placing Baby Ink on his feet in front of the Peppa Pig magazine, with its forbidden inky treat. And I really should have paid attention to what I was buying for my son, but some mysterious force blinded me to the 'FREE GIFT!' on the cover of the magazine. My inkheart made me do it. (That's what I'm telling Social Services, anyway.)

Later that night, I found myself casually reading the small print on the cover of the publication. Perhaps it was just the size of the typeface, I told myself, that made me overlook the words 'POTENTIAL CHOKING HAZARD'. But perhaps not. I realized that my inkheart was definitely to blame when I also spotted the sentence 'INK MAY STAIN' in the printed warning. (I've ranted in previous posts about how modern culture's obsession with risk management leads to such absurdities, so I won't complain again here. Actually, I will. Ink may stain, you say? Of course ink may stain. That's why they call it ink. [With apologies to Danny De Vito's character in David Mamet's Heist.] Should we also label taps with 'Water may wet' and radiators with 'Heat may heat'?)

Freud tells us that our conscious minds often filter out information that's there before our very eyes. (This is, if I remember correctly, how he explains the phenomenon of déja vu.) I didn't consciously see the reference to ink on the cover of the magazine in front of which I placed Baby Ink, but my inkheart (or my inkconscious, to give things a more Freudian gloss) evidently did. And it led me unknowingly to act out a situation in which potentially fatal ink was thrust into the hands of my offsprink.

I clearly cannot be trusted. I am, I can now see, a man driven solely by ink, by an inkheart. I am, if I may be forgiven a heart-to-heart moment, doomed to walk around with my heart in my mouth, always at risk of risk. Who knows what life-threatening act I will next be driven to by ink? I am Inkheart, but I can, for that very reason, never be in heart.

Ink being pumped around my body today: Rohrer and Klingner Sepia.

Crate Expectations

Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.

Readers wearily familiar with the misanthropic and anti-social ways of Ink Quest will probably not be surprised to learn that I detest New Year's Eve. While raucous hordes stumbled past my house in search of midnight, setting off fireworks that terrified my cats and roused Baby Ink from his slumber, I sat inside in my best hair shirt, reading Tolstoy's Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?, nibbling stale bread, and stubbornly ignoring the arrival of another year. (Actually, there was little stubborn about it: I, like many parents of toddlers, no doubt, was fast asleep long before the chimes sounded.)

Even more annoying than the festivities, perhaps, is the inane ritual of making a set of resolutions for the coming year. Why do people feel the need to pretend to be virtuous just because December has grumbled into January? I resolutely resist resolutions! I was, then, pleased to learn this morning that Mind, one of Britain's mental-health charities (the hyphen is crucial there, I feel), has declared that vowing to turn over a new leaf on 1 January can actually be damaging to one's health. Here is how the BBC News website explains things:

Mind chief executive Paul Farmer said focussing on problems or insecurities can lead to feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem and even mild depression. "We chastise ourselves for our perceived shortcomings and set unrealistic goals to change our behaviour, so it's not surprising that when we fail to keep resolutions, we end up feeling worse than when we started," he said. "In 2009, instead of making a New Year's resolution, think positively about the year to come and what you can achieve."

Feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem and even mild depression are perfectly normal for me, and I wouldn't want it any other way. As George Costanza once put it, 'I feel like my old self again: neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate, completely insecure. It's a pleasure!' Positive thinking is positively alien to my being, and I find myself driven to extreme levels of rage ('Serenity now!') by people who insist on seeing hope in everything. Accent the negative and eliminate the positive, people. (But just don't tell me that it's your New Year's resolution to be more pessimistic.)

While I applaud Mind's decision to attack the institution of resolutions, I will not, therefore, be taking Paul Farmer's advice and thinking positively about 2009. The name of our new year ends with a 'nein', after all, liebe Leser, so we were unavoidably plunged into the realm of the negative at the stroke of midnight on 31 December. (Here comes two thousand and ... NEIN!) By complete coincidence, however, I have started the year by reorganizing my inks. As I sit typing these words, the bottles, vials, and cartridges sit happily in a new wooden box behind me. I have reached out and tapped it with my knuckle on several occasions, just to enjoy the timbre of the timber.

The move from the old box was long overdue. I can't remember exactly when I purchased it, but it must have been in the very early days of the Penquod's quest for the perfect ink, as the container couldn't really hold that many bottles. It had reached the point, in fact, where ink was stacked upon ink ... and sometimes stacked upon ink stacked upon ink. This meant that I very often forgot all about certain colours in my collection. It was not until I emptied the old box while the recent loft conversion was underway, for instance, that I remembered my ownership of Diamine Washable Blue. Then, to my amazement, I stumbled across a vial of Campo Marzio Roma Sepia sent to me by honorary Penquod member Anna some time ago. I remember being delighted to receive this somewhat rare brown, but it must have slipped to the bottom of the ink box and, in doing so, slipped from my memory. It is now at the top of the pile and ready to find its way into the next available pen.

Some would probably see these oversights as proof that I own too much ink; I, however, simply decided that it was time to expand my storage facilities, and so I recently purchased a small wooden crate (pictured above) from my local branch of Ikea. All of the inks have been transferred with great care to the new container, and I now feel ready to enter 2009 with a better sense of what I actually own. For once I can lift the lid and see at a glance my entire collection of ink. This will be the year in which I forget not a single colour, in which I rotate my shades in a more inklusive manner. Thanks to the new ink box, I have crate expectations for the coming twelve months. Call it case of boxing clever.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Standard Brown; Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black.