A thin film of dust has accumulated on my trusty heat gun; I haven’t opened my toolbox in more than a week. No pens to repair and I am in enforced idleness. We are all the prisoners of Covid-19, a pesky coil of DNA that is destroyed by a soap-bubble but has killed millions the world o’er.  Of course it isn’t really as bad as that. I have many pens to play with and the internet is full of pens to admire and read about. My life is not entirely dedicated to fountain pens; I have a few other interests.

This has now gone on so long that it has become the new normality. It seems incredible that a day will dawn again when I can go to the post office with my pen packages and send them winging round the world, but it will come. I’m not quite sure when then that will happen and the government isn’t much help with their hurry up/slow down pronouncements but the day will come.

I’m grateful, in a way, for the mandated change of pace and the opportunity to spend time with other interests. I’ve spent some time with Yeats and MacDiarmid and I’ve been delving into the Dark Ages. That’s all very well but I want to deploy my knock-out block, have a go at nib-straightening and bite-mark removing.

As Augustus de Morgan said,

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

Why can’t this miserable virus contract a killer virus of its own and dwindle away into history and let me get back to pen-fixing?

Go away, you damned virus!