Pam Alison Knits

I think the time has come to work my way through some ink and I’m going to start with this massive bottle of deep, dark purple from Scribo. When I started to think about an ink to pair with the Onoto, this was high on the agenda. I originally popped in a cartridge of Herbin’s Bleu des Profondeurs because I was away from home and cartridges are so easy to travel with. The dark blue was just fine, but a bit boring, especially as I ended up with the same colour in every pen for a while. I used up the cartridge then cleaned the pen. Onoto supplied a converter so I also flushed that through, ready for some bottled ink. Fountain Pen Day rolled along on November 1st and this proved to be the ideal point to uncap the ink and get it inside the pen.

This ink was another Pen Show purchase, but back in 2022 on my first visit to the London Pen Show. I feel a little sad that it’s two years old and hardly been used, the explanation being that I have fallen into the trap of keeping it for best – something I hate doing.

I have enjoyed this pen and ink combination and I’m having such a good time with the oblique nib on the Onoto. I think the bold lines particularly suit a deep, self-assured ink. I know that often fountain pen users default to broader nibs to showcase the variations in shade that some less saturated inks produce, and that is also lovely. Broader lines also make some paler inks more legible. But for my taste it’s the emphatic consistency of this ink which works perfectly with the strength of the oblique nib grind.

I have a few thoughts about Notturno Viola as a colour and as an ink. First of all, it’s not one of your fancy spectacular inks – no glitter or glimmer or sheening or colour-changing. It’s entirely happy just being a simple, dark purple ink and that is its strength. I think it’s an eminently office-appropriate ink. There may be professions where it would not pass muster, but they must surely be few and far between. It is sober enough to pass as almost-black, cloaking its subversive purple in stealth mode. It is the purple equivalent of a good blue-black (love of my formative years). Not that I am taking this pair to work with me! It is strictly being used in my journal at present where, I am happy to report, it is not showing any tendency to bleed through the 75gsm Silvine “education quality” paper.

Drying times are acceptable. Naturally, it takes a little longer to dry than inks do when I use my fine and extra-fine nibs with their somewhat stingy flow. I am slowly learning to accept this as an inevitable part of a move to slightly wider, wetter nibs. Part of the reason for that move was to use up inks more quickly, and you can’t have that without extending the drying time a tad.

I must admit that I am finding the quantity of ink in this bottle quite daunting. I don’t want to be that person with bottles of ink that stick around forever, so I need a strategy to use the ink I have. Together with using pens that guzzle a little extra ink, I need to write more, and write more frequently. Enjoying just sitting writing with my pens is one of a whole host of things that have been subsumed by the weariness I experience in these twilight years of my formal working life. I think it’s partly justifiable to feel that I haven’t the energy to do much when I’ve got to the end of a long working day. Then again, I suspect that I’m indulging myself a little, feeling a little sorry that I am still dragging myself off to work when I want to be free to do the things that please me. It’s time to take myself in hand and use the time I do have for myself in more pleasing ways. Therefore, I am making a start by promising myself that I will make inroads into this bottle of ink. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of the pen when I spend more time with it in my hand.