Pam Alison Knits

It feels like this summer went on forever, but now the welcome signs of a change are peeping over the horizon, and August – always the longest month in my opinion – is drawing to a close.

In my pen and paper world, I continue to enjoy using my blue Filofax Finsbury with the purple Waterman Hemisphere. I ran through the fill of Pilot Iroshizuku’s “Yama Budo” then, unimaginatively, filled this one up with the Scribo’s “Notturno Viola”. Flicking back through my pages, neither of these inks is quite hitting the mark, not promoting the feeling I crave. The pen will stay, but it’s overdue for a fill with either Diamine’s “Kensington Blue” or Waterman’s “Inspired Blue”.

In late July I hit a snag with my Filofax diary pages – the week on two-page insert was working perfectly, but I messed them up trying to keep up with all the changes about work desks. First up, my job role moved from one team to another so technically speaking I shouldn’t be booking desk space where my old team sat. We hadn’t been told when the team change would happen so I’d already filled in my desk bookings for the first couple of weeks of August. I crossed those out and put in my new desk bookings, fine and dandy. Then we were told we needed to work from home the first two weeks of August to make space for some colleagues whilst their offices were repaired. More crossing out. We were encouraged to book our desks for the return from 11th August, so wrote all those in, then it turned out we’d have to work from home until the end of the month…. My diary pages couldn’t cope and nor could I. So I swapped the old August pages for some from a different diary and started afresh.

I like the extra space each weekday on the new pages, and I love having lines. However, this design has very restricted space for Saturday and Sunday. Honestly, whoever designed the Earth standard week with an odd number of days needs to be taken to task. I slightly miss having a notes area on the page, too. The thing I found most surprising is that on the Cotton Cream diary pages I haven’t had the slightest concern over the silly QR codes, yet I found them terribly intrusive on the replacement pages. Is it because they are at the top of the box rather than the bottom? Is it the blue ink on the slightly paler paper? I don’t know, but I had to put stickers over them! That still defines the area where I can jot down the day’s high and low temperatures, but I was fascinated by the amount of difference in my experience this tiny design detail made. I interleaved each week with a 3/4 width page to provide a running to-do list. Now August is departing, the desk situation has been resolved, and it’s full steam ahead towards autumn.

I want to say that I haven’t yet been tempted to set up the A5 Holborn, but there have been some brief experiments. As things stand, I’m just ridiculously fond of the Personal Filofax.

Early in August, I had a bit of an ink revelation, and not in a good way. It was the morning I decided to quickly fill my Montblanc Slimline with Graf von Faber-Castell Cobalt ink and ended up with my hands absolutely covered in the deep blue shade. If you’re familiar with the film “The Abyss”, it was pretty much a re-enactment of the scene where Ed Harris throws his wedding ring into the chemical toilet then plunges his hands in to retreive it! To provide a little history, I love Cobalt Blue. I had it first in a pack of six cartridges and I always wanted the fancy-shmancy gift box of twenty cartridges they used to make, but instead I bought the bottle. Graf von Faber-Castell’s bottles are very beautiful with a slight brutalist vibe, and they are on the list of many a pen-user’s favourite ink bottles. Yet I have had issues. The bottle cap looks fantastic with its silver-coloured metal, but on my bottle the silver parted company with the underlying plastic cap and I only had a modicum of success in sticking it back on. Every so often it would work loose and need refixing. Then, at some point, there was a leak. I don’t know when, I don’t know how. I always kept the bottle in its box and one day I couldn’t get it out of the box – there was a gloop of ink which had dried solid between the bottle and the cardboard inner sleeve. I got that sorted out and threw out the inner sleeve. On this most recent inking, I noticed that there was still a solid patch of dried ink adhering to the bottom of the bottle and I went through quite a number of wet wipes before I got it clean – this was the point where my hands became chemical-lavatory blue. Sadly I had to admit that I was getting irritated every time I used the ink, and from there it was just a short step to disposing of the ink, thoroughly washed the bottle, and chalking it all up to experience. If I bought this ink again, I’d stick to cartridges. But, honestly, I have a whole bottle of Montblanc Midnight Blue so I’m never going to need to buy any more dark blue ink.

As we move into September I am planning to change my desk, a bittersweet milestone as I’ve had my current desk for more than 30 years. Yet the time has finally come to admit that it doesn’t quite suit my purposes, though I’m not entirely sure that any desk will do that. Like handbags, a desk needs to exist in several different states at the same time. It needs to be small and unobtrusive when not in use, yet large and sprawling when the occasion calls for space. It needs to look aesthetically pleasing at all times, whilst providing immediate access to any stationery or computer item one might suddenly have a call for. The thing I struggle with most with choosing a new desk (or, indeed, any new piece of furniture) is that it won’t have a story. I always like hand-me-downs because I leap straight into the middle of their history. But the desk is primarily for working on my creative writing – its story will be one with the stories I write; it will be a learning space; it will have to earn its place in my heart and in my life. Hopefully it will cope with the learning paraphernalia at least as well as my current setup.

Speaking of study, last night I embarked on my first trot through a new-to-me creative writing workbook. It’s a bit of a whopper, definitely a text-book, but that makes it feel a bit more serious. I was feeling the need for something a bit less hippy, a bit more get-down-to-the-work than my more recent reads on the subject.

I hope the summer has been kind to you and, if it hasn’t, that you’re gathering your resources ready to march into autumn with renewed vigour.