Bring on the inks

This was the lineup at the weekend when I sat down to choose my pens and inks for March. It is almost all the inks I own, the absences are one pack of cartridges which are living at work and one bottle which is hiding away until April. The initial whittling-down was pretty easy because…

London Pen Show Pt II

Here we are with part two of my London Pen Show recap. This time I’m going to talk about my new Waterman Exception, the pen which I’ve had on my wish-list for a long time but always seemed out of my reach. This is a super pen with some great design features, most notably the…

The Blue Book

I've had a bit of an itch for a few weeks now, and in an attempt to soothe it I have purchased a new notebook. I am calling it The Blue Book. This name has a history for me. Many years ago, in a job which I remember with fondness, I had a catch-all notebook…

The universe reclining

This week has been busy. Productive, yes; interesting, yes; fun, a bit; but mainly busy. The fun definitely arrived with the new cassette player and I can see this becoming one of my favourite Etsy purchases. The Joan Baez cassette was so familiar on first listening that I'm convinced it must have been in my…

Dimanche encore

If I could, this Sunday morning, bestow upon one person an award for the most consistent use of fountain pens in "pop" videos, I'd go for the French singer Julien Clerc. He is not new to me, I bought a cassette of his hits in Paris in 1980 and have had a soft spot for…

Green ink and the apocalypse

Flowers for a friend 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…