Most people who know me, know that I like fountain pens, and I like letting other people try them out and get ideas about how to write, and get enthused about handwriting again. I’ve got a pen set that I take from convention to convention, place to place, and I sit down with people and let them use the pens, try out what they like, and it often ends up with me giving them one of the pens so that they’ve got a starting point without having to spend anything.
In advance, I’m not rich, but the pens I give away aren’t expensive, and it’s important to me that the world doesn’t lose the ability and creativity of writing by hand.
The more the world goes on, the more we start relying on things like AI, the more we lose connection with what it is to be personally creative, rather than just typing something in and letting an algorithm do it for us. I can type at 60 words a minute when I’m using the keyboard, this article took me less than ten minutes to type, but when I look back at it on the screen, I won’t remember how I felt or how the day was when I was typing it.
That’s not the case in my journal, I handwrite at maybe ten words a minute, and I can tell, just from the look of the letters on the page, the pen I used, hell, even the colour of ink I was using, what I was feeling when I wrote those words, and that’s important to me.
But I digress, couple of years back, just finished the day at Expo and I was back in the Hilton closing up the day when some of the other fountain pens enthusiasts came around and we all got the sets out and sat down to do some writing, try each others pens, and just enjoy like minded company. Into this wandered a few young men who had been looking to play a game that evening, but we didn’t have any left and I invited them to sit with us and try out pens and inks. I don’t recall what they went away with that day, I do this all the time, in the quiet words of Raul Julia, for me, this was Tuesday, but I was cheerful that they got something they liked and they were inspired to write.
Fast forwards to this last weekend at Dragonmeet, and I get a call from the front desk that a young man wants to see me, so I go to the front of the lower trade hall and there’s a young man that I don’t immediately recognise, but he introduces himself as Race (hope I’m spelling that right), and reminds me of the night at Expo a few years back when I got him to sit down and enjoy writing.
And he curses me there, for introducing him to what has been one of the defining passions in his life since, and for all the money that he’s now spent on those pens and inks, and all the enjoyment that he’s had from them since. He shows me the pen collections that he’s got with him (Some damn nice stuff in there, few lovely bits of custom work as well), and for a second, he’s concerned that I don’t have a pen with me, till I glance down at my hip holster, where three sit waiting.
And then he produces this box of Iroshizuku inks and hands it to me with two words.
“Thank you.”
I’m not often stuck for words, I don’t do this for the thanks, but he’d got those inks for me and tried to find me at Expo to say thanks, and when I wasn’t there any more, he’d looked me up and come down to London to give me this, and I was humbled.
It matters what you do in life, in every action you take, it might be Tuesday to you, but to someone else, that random kindness might be everything to them. So now I have to curse him back, because those really are some beautiful inks, and I may need to get a new pen to use them in…
Damnit… 😊
The student become the master..