What better way to begin the new year than by starting on a new book? Or at least by beginning to make notes on a new book. And maybe trying something different besides always writing on the same old laptop. Why not try to write with a pen?
I don’t find penmanship easy. When I was young I could barely write a sentence on the page in a legible scrawl. I even had two distinct styles of handwriting. One was called backhand, where the letters sloped to the left and the other was a “forward hand” where the letters sloped to the far right. Of course the right-leaning scrawl was seen as perfection while the letters that reached backwards in the sentence were a sign of decadence.
It’s as if I were two distinct people; I used a forward hand for writing essays in school which teachers would sift through with a red biro, while with the other secret backhand style I wrote poems in a little notebook when nobody was looking. The backhand writing came naturally with the feel and form of the poem and I still love notebooks as opposed to the keyboard. Which is why I was looking for ink cartridges to fit my fountain pen.
The pen was a birthday gift but I couldn’t find the correct cartridge for it anywhere. The cartridges in the local stationery shops wouldn’t fit the barrel of this particular pen. So eventually I reached out to Amazon, which flew the correct cartridge from somewhere in England to Dublin, and a courier transported it from there by road to Leitrim. A lot of bother just to get ink into a pen I suppose.
An old friend asked if I was ‘still at the writing’. ‘When I can get the ink,’ I said
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One day after Christmas I went into Carrick-on-Shannon and bought a new notebook and a Lismore copybook, and on the way out the door an old schoolfriend saluted me and asked if I was “still at the writing”.
“Yes,” I said. “When I can get the ink.”
He didn’t get the joke but nonetheless we went for coffee in a little place by the river which was empty apart from a disgruntled elderly couple, seated with mugs of coffee and a big bun on the table between them. I suspect they might have been in the throes of a ferocious argument. If one of them was Putin then the other was Zelenskiy and the bun in the middle was Ukraine. The waitress brought them a knife and eventually they split the bun in half.
When I got home the phone rang unexpectedly and I pressed the green “Accept” button too quickly and found myself on a video call with a relative I’m not fond of. And face-to-face phone calls unnerve me.
The pen had vanished into thin f**king air. Clearly the universe didn’t want me writing by hand
Instantly he had immediate access to my private world. I felt the boundary of my space was being crossed. He could see the mess in my studio. He could scrutinise the books behind me, and perhaps deduce from the scatter of tablets on the desk and the pile of empty whiskey bottles on the bookshelf that I was falling apart.
I held the phone tight to my snout so that all he could see on his screen was my bewildered face. Although that might not have reflected well on my mental health either.
“Well, how is things?” he wondered. “How did you get over the Christmas?”
“It’s not over yet,” I moaned, trying to make conversation. “Not until they take the lights down.”
“Are you writing anything?” He wondered.
“No,” says I. “I’m waiting for ink.”
Thankfully Amazon put an end to the intrusion because the cartridge actually arrived while we were speaking. A courier was waving at the window with a number of deliveries for the house.
Alone with the Amazon package I was like a child beholding a precious gift; I scrutinised the little cartridge and assured myself that it was the right one for the pen. And all I had to do now was find the pen on the desk and clip the cartridge into the barrel and, hey presto, I’d be writing the outline of a new book. I might even pen some letters thanking friends for gifts that had come during the holiday season.
[ I take angels very seriously, having met two in my lifeOpens in new window ]
A cosy evening by the stove lay before me dispatching messages to loved ones penned in my elegant poetic backhand. If I could only find the pen.
But the pen had vanished into thin f**king air. Clearly the universe didn’t want me writing by hand. And so all I could do is begin the new year as always, by opening my lovely laptop.