Over the weekend I finally finished my re-read of Greg Bear’s “The Forge of God”. I spent several weeks ambling through the first two-fifths of this novel and then raced through the larger part in two days flat. Sometimes you re-read a novel and you wonder what you saw in it the first time round, but this one proved itself well worth a revisit. The characters are very well-written, though the main focus of the story is on male characters which won’t be to everyone’s taste. The conclusion is apocalyptic, but it’s the little losses along the way that hit home and remind us that life doesn’t stop being unfair just because the end of the world is nigh.

Oddly, this novel turned out to kill two birds with one stone. I have intended to re-read The Forge of God for many, many years. I have also been trying to track down a Clive Cussler novel I read in the late 1990s in which a particular event is witnessed on board an ocean exploration ship. I could never work out which of Cussler’s books it was, and no-one I mentioned it to who had a passing acquaintance with this author could place it either. On Sunday morning I happily had my nose in the Greg Bear novel when an event happened and was witnessed by scientists on board an ocean exploration ship…. I swear I caught myself thinking ‘That’s exactly like the Clive Cussler novel,’ before it hit me that I had entirely misremembered the details and it had been this book all along.

I went into a bit of a pen-filling frenzy at the end of last week and inked up a further three fountain pens, all with green inks. One of my latest purchases has been a pack of Graf von Faber-Castell’s Viper Green ink cartridges, although I have all along told myself that this shade would be almost identical to Diamine’s Meadow which I already owned. Despite it seeming ludicrous to have both at the same time, the name “Viper Green” called to me and I had to give it a spin, if only to give me a chance to do a head-on comparison. I was interested to find they are not so similar after all.

Looking at both the colours on pretty standard white paper in the Silvine exercise book, I prefer the colour of the Viper Green, although it reminds me a bit of standard green biro ink. Where it loses out to Meadow is in the shading. It will be fun to try Viper Green in other pens to see if there is a level of magic to be coaxed from it as there was with Gulf Blue. The third pen has been filled with Graf von Faber-Castell’s Moss Green which has been a particular favourite of mine in the past. This knocks the other two out of the ball-park and is the only one I would feel inclined to buy in a full-sized bottle. As green inks go, it’s entirely work-appropriate, sophisticated and subtle in a way that the brighter greens can’t match.

Now there’s a new week to look forward to and the possibility that I will commence my re-read of A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright. I can recall nothing about this story, but I kept the book so it must have resonated with me when I first read it. If I have no knitting to show you during the week it will mean that the novel has proved to be absorbing.