Pam Alison Knits

We’re friends. I feel we’ve been hanging out together enough that you know you can trust me. If I sit down to write my post about the four pens I’ve got inked for August, you can be sure that’s exactly what you’ll get. I did, indeed, intend to write about my currently inked pens for August 2026. Yet here is a strangely tangential post featuring one of the inks I chose to use in August, one I used in July, and two others which suddenly seemed like they would be good for comparison.

Our lesson for today is that you can’t trust me. I can’t trust me!

To get a decent sample of each ink, I’ve written out some paragraphs from Paul Darrow’s 1989 novel “Avon A Terrible Aspect”. Watch out for a bit of shameless fangirling at the end of this post.

I’ve been using Kaweco’s Paradise Blue for a few weeks to see if it’s that blue. You know the one (or perhaps you don’t). It’s a blue that’s quite bright, a bit on the lighter side, with a slight amount of green, but it’s definitely not turquoise. That blue you know when you see it, but you can’t quite describe it. That blue which a few inks suggest they will be but somehow aren’t quite. Paradise Blue isn’t it which is a shame. Also, for some strange reason because I couldn’t detect any kind of leak, every time I picked up the pen I had this ink inside, I got smudges of Paradise Blue on my fingers. In the end I’ve got rather fed up with this phenomenon.

Whilst I was using the Paradise Blue I thought it might be very similar to Graf von Faber-Castell’s Gulf Blue. I’d had this in the past and, whilst I wasn’t keen to start off with, it grew on me over time. So I bought a pack of cartridges to give it another go and decided to ink up a pen with it to start August.

As you can see, Paradise Blue comes across with a definite green cast when it sits beside Gulf Blue. I see I’ve spelt “Graf” wrong in my handwritten pieces. Never mind, we get the gist of it. Seeing these together cements my feeling that the Faber-Castell is my preferred colour.

The other ink I’ve always thought Gulf Blue resembled is Waterman Inspired Blue. So I was inspired (sorry) to grab a pen and ink this up to compare.

Much closer, but the Waterman has a little more green. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

As I was putting away the Waterman ink, I started to wonder if Diamine Kensington Blue sits in this branch of the blue family. So I dug out another pen and inked it up. Yes, now I have four pens inked with vaguely similar blue inks, only one of which was part of my August currently inked selection.

Aha. Kensington Blue is an outsider – much more of a traditional mid-blue than that blue is. I’m surprised by how dark it looks in comparison with the other three. For comparison purposes we don’t need to include this one, though we’ve still got an entire pen full of it that we must write dry…

So, we have a greenier to blueier spread with Paradise Blue on one end, Gulf Blue on the other end and Inspired Blue somewhere in between. Just for fun, here are Paradise Blue and Inspired Blue together. Now we can clearly see that Inspired Blue has less green.

My takeaway is that Inspired Blue and Gulf Blue sit neck-and-neck. Either is perfectly acceptable to me as that blue and I’ll be happy so long as I have one or the other on hand at all times. I wouldn’t buy Paradise Blue, though that doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad colour. I just don’t gravitate to turquoise.

Oh, and the book? Well, here is the inside front cover. It’s signed by Paul Darrow himself (Avon in the Blakes 7 BBC series) and by Gareth Thomas (the eponymous Blake in the TV series). The third signature, and in some ways my favourite because he drew me a picture of the Liberator, is Martin Bower who worked on the original models of the Liberator used in the TV series. My little model of the Liberator came with the DVD box set of the first series which I also have signed by Gareth Thomas.

I sometimes think I’ve outgrown Blakes 7, but I’m kidding myself. I know that because I only have to think about the Liberator “dying” at the end of the third series to start tearing up.