The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  * Monsters from the Id!

  * What did he mean? (I have reasons to think this marginaliast was a man.) That no American has sex before marriage? That every married American is perfectly satisfied with the amount and quality of sex he has?

  * The last two observations precede the great sociologist Erving Goffman’s observations of performed actions by forty years or so.

  * An interesting light is cast on this peculiar observation by Charlus’s claim, much later in the novel, in The Prisoner, that Odette ‘couldn’t spell to save her life, I had to write all her letters’. Does Charlus’s handwriting have an affectation of British stiffness on ill-formed letters? Or is he boasting pointlessly and wrongly at the Verdurin’s, much later?

  * Few graphologists would seriously suggest, subsequently, that family resemblances to one’s ancestors or (more plausible a reading of Proust’s point here) social class can be deduced from handwriting.

  * Of Lonrho, responsible for one of the most famous crooked episodes in the City, described by the British Prime Minister Edward Heath as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’.

  † Presentable at court, used in a metaphorical sense.

  * Transparent casing for objects which carry out a task ought to be much more common than they are. I’ve never understood why all toasters aren’t transparent, allowing you to avoid that tiresome popping up and replacing of the bread until it’s reached the exactly right stage of browning.

  † It scores 8.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness. By comparison, steel scores 4–4.5 and diamond scores 10.

  * We forget what a miracle this is – I mean, everything has to dry, and it’s beyond me to explain why all inks don’t dry with the slowness of poster paint. For the record, experiments involving transferring large amounts of ink from page to paper have just now shown that Waterman’s ink out of my fountain pen takes nine seconds to dry completely.

  † A comedian reviews the wonderful Bic ballpoint pen on Amazon.co.uk, drawing attention to many of its miraculous qualities as though they were too ordinary to be worth mentioning. Should have spent more time in school learning to spell, and less in attempting to be cool:

  ‘I was looking for an upgrade from my HB2 Pencil and I was unsure about what to go for until I came across this Bic pen.

  I was realy excited about opening my new product once it had arrived, I removed a pen from its protective packaging which was realy well sealed. For the first few days after ordering my new pen I was slightly unsure about how to actualy use it, it came with no instruction guide, it was untill later on in the week and countless hours of attempting to write I hit Google and realised that the black tip at the end was removable only to reveal the ‘nib’ of the pen. This black romovable think was infact a lid to keep ink fresh.

  Ok so onto performance, after I started to write(also this pen may be used for doodling and scibbling) I was amazed at the quality of the ink, it was no cheap ink like you would find in other cheap pens at your local retailers, this ink is something special, and it does not smudge either.

  The biggest major flaw with this pen(which is possibly a design fault) is that I am assuming this pen is for left handers only(although the packiging did not mention this) I think this because I can write superbly neat in my left hand but when I switch over to my right hand I start to write as if i were wearing a blindfold, so to all you ‘right handers’ stay away from this product.

  The design of this pen was realy well thought out, the ‘see through’ barrel of the pen allows you to keep watch over how much ink you have left to write with in the pen, so when you are running out you can simply order a new pen in time.

  A few days ago I stupidly lost the lid to my pen, I got onto Bic customer service to see if my pen was under warranty to see if they could send me a new one or simply replace my lid, the lady on the other end just laughed at me and hung up, this goes to show that the customer sevice for this company is not very good at all!

  I take my new pen everywhere with me and could not leave home without it, somebody even saw that I had a brand new bic and asked me if they could borrow it! The cheeky fella must have realised how good this pen was as he tried to walk off with it, but I managed to get it back and he claimed ‘he forgot’.

  Anyway I am overall pleased with this product.

  Only negative points are the lack of instructions on operating this pen and the customer service is atrocious.

  Three ***

  * École Normale d’Administration. An institution for turning out supercilious French public servants, known as Enarques, some of whom subsequently become notably inefficient politicians, and just now (May 2012) President of the Republic without ever having run anything. It was set up by General de Gaulle in 1945 and has been loathed by most right-thinking Frenchmen ever since.

  * I’ve just checked on American Amazon, and you can (2012) buy ten Bic Cristal pens for $1.47, or a shade under 15 cents a pen. There are things which have got cheaper in cash terms over fifty years, but somehow you don’t expect the Bic pen to be one of them.

  * The shape of a bottle of ink is surely unique, designed for maximum stability – you really don’t want to upset a full bottle of ink over anyone. There is something pleasing about an object whose exact nature and function you could identify without any hesitation if it were handed to you blindfold, just from its shape. I don’t suppose anyone will ever want to change the shape of a bottle of ink, as first-year design students of my generation were constantly being asked to rethink the CD rack.

  † Reginald Piggott, whose Survey has already supplied one eccentric moment to this book in his study of different-coloured writing inks and what they signify in the hands of ballet dancers and lady novelists, now supplies another with a madly instructive drawing headed ‘Correct Method Of Filling Fountain Pen’. In three drawings, Mr Piggott shows us INCORRECT METHOD, where only half the nib is in the ink, CORRECT METHOD, with labels indicating LEVEL OF INK, POINT OF NIB CLEAR OF BASE, and NIB COMPLETELY SUBMERGED. In the third drawing, a totally reckless penman is shown INCREASING INK LEVEL, where a half-filled bottle of ink is apparently tipped off the side of a table at an angle of about 30 degrees without evident support, while the pen is dipped into the deeper end. Thinking about the white sheepskin rug which inevitably sat under this suicidal enterprise, it took me some time to realize that Mr Piggott was actually recommending this procedure, rather than just warning against the consequences of doing anything other than going to buy a fresh bottle of Waterman’s.

  * It is part of the John Lewis group, whose indefatigably well-put motto is ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’. Until some years ago, every department store in the group was permitted to keep its original name, although they all retained the corporate logo and style and ranges of goods – the one in Sheffield was called Cole Brothers, for instance. For no very obvious reason, all of a sudden they were all renamed John Lewis, except for the one in Sloane Square, which was permitted to retain the name of Peter Jones. Everyone regretted the change – the different names under a single umbrella was a charming nod to local sensibilities while retaining big-corporation reliability. I suppose Peter Jones’s clientele was just the sort of person the senior partners of John Lewis were more likely to encounter at the dinner table, complaining about the loss of their shop’s well-loved name, so they kept that one. Anyway, I don’t think anyone took much notice. My parents still say ‘I’m sure you’ll find it in Cole’s’, of anything at all, from cummerbund to cherry-stoner, about twice a week.

  * Stationery shop, which, considering the innate joy of such places, manages to be about as joyless as a stationery shop could conceivably be, rising to the dizzy height of different-coloured box files.

  * Anyway, you can lie to people, who tend to be credulous in this area of life. For years, I got a rise out of visitors by telling them that the ornamental double C on lamp posts in the City of Westminster, including Soho, was because Coco Chanel had designed the street-lighting there.

  * Sig
nalled, inevitably, in a copperplate sign propped up on a sort of easel.

  * Pangram: a sentence containing all twenty-six letters, useful for handwriting exercises and to test keyboards. The most famous is the classic ‘The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog’, which dates back to 1888, making it coeval with the invention of the typewriter. People often write ‘jumped’, which makes it no longer a pangram. Other pangrams worth considering include ‘Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex!’, ‘Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes’ and ‘My jocks box, get hard, unzip, quiver, flow’, which you might write on a pad in Harrods, but never, ever, ever, in Peter Jones. A charming novel by Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea, is about an island whose inhabitants worship the creator of the ‘lazy dog’ pangram.

  † According to Reginald Piggott, v. supra.

  * ‘In spite of computers, handwriting instruction is important because of carry-over to composition’, University of Washington News, 30 January 1998.

  * I have a succession of notebooks, each about the size of my palm, bound in bright leather so you can’t mislay them about the house, with the perfect addition of an elastic cloth strap to stop the pages from flapping open and, more usefully, allowing you to keep your pen and notebook together and not to have to go delving into your man-bag saying that you could have sworn you had a pen with you. The notebooks are Swedish in manufacturer, and I would tell you where I get them, but the shop in Geneva is staffed by such up-themselves shop assistants that I really don’t think I want to put any more custom their way. Still, their notebooks are gorgeous, well worth it if you find the shop through your own initiative.

  * The Queen, it is known, writes a diary by hand. In some documentary about ‘A Year In The Life of Her Maj’, the Archbishop of Canterbury was discovered finding out, while in the Presence, that this was so, and was recorded saying something to the effect of ‘What? You write it on your own? In your own hand?’ The Queen responded by saying, ‘Well, I don’t know any other way of doing it’, the implication being that she thought the cleric was suggesting that she dictated it to a flunky, writing with a swan’s quill on vellum. I dare say that, as time has gone on, the question of security and privacy has arisen, and the Household, or just her Majesty, has rightly concluded that what is written by hand can’t be sent off to the Daily Express with a press of a button by some disgruntled and underpaid junior in her private office.

  * For non-English readers: the Nice Day Out is a national pastime and institution. The rules are as follows: you identify a beauty spot, country house, small historic town, within forty-five minutes to ninety minutes of your home. You travel there by bus or train or (slightly inauthentically) your own transport made by M. Citroen or the Bavarian Motor Company or some such. You get off, and take a walk round the designated destination. You and your chosen companion have lunch in a pub or teashop. After lunch, light-headed with pleasure, you buy an absurd souvenir of the place, OR have a short but telling argument over nothing very much. Late in the afternoon you take the public transport back home, remarking as you get off at Clapham Junction that you don’t know why, but you don’t think there’s a single thing in the fridge for dinner. At some point in this outing, from now on, you will also buy a postcard and send it to your mum and dad.

  Also by Philip Hensher

  Other Lulus

  Kitchen Venom

  Pleasured

  The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife

  The Mulberry Empire

  The Fit

  The Northern Clemency

  King of the Badgers

  Scenes from Early Life

  First published 2012 by Macmillan

  This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

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  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-76736-2 EPUB

  Copyright © Philip Hensher 2012

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