I’ll be uploading this lot to the sales site just as soon as I can get the photos and descriptions done. Tomorrow, probably.

Thank you all for your concern and kind comments.  We’re both home and husband is out of the woods.  Not to get too medical, but it was one of those situations where a medicine prescribed turns out to be the very worst thing possible with an unexpected, potentially lethal side-effect.  Still, all’s well that ends well.  Martin, you’ve had a terrible time and you’re much in my thoughts.  May all go well with you.

All the sold pens are dispatched and now I’m beginning to catch up with other things.  I have some wonderful pens to post about, some Swans, some other interesting pens.

Thank you all again.  Here’s a very fine Swan logo from around 1910:

Hi All, just a quick post with apologies for the recent silence.  My husband is currently in hospital, rather unexpectedly, and we are far enough away from there to merit my overnight stays nearby rather than trying to get back and forth each day.  This leaves me computerless (too late did I discover that the hospital accommodation supposedly has free wifi!), and so while I have posts brewing in my brain, it may be a few days until I can get back to writing.  It’ll be back and forth the next couple of days by necessity, but it’s more like a flying visit to home, throw clothes in the washer, bravely bear the cat’s guilt-attacks, collect the mail and head back out for the early train in the morning.  Only reason I came home this evening was to handle eBay sales, correspondence, and of course, to assuage the now-wild-eyed cat who, even as I type, sits next to the laptop yowling at me in what amounts to cat cursing.  At least, that’s what the set of her ears is telling me!

Hope to be back soon, believe me…

There have been less posts this last week or two. Mea culpa, but I plead in mitigation that life has been thoroughly hectic and every little niggling thing that takes forever to fix went wrong in that time. While I’m doing the sackcloth and ashes bit, you may have noticed that the standard of my photos has dropped from the just-about-acceptable to the frankly awful. Wherever it’s possible I use daylight, because it gives the truest image. Trouble is, here in the Northern Highlands daylight can be a scarce commodity for a few months either side of the autumnal equinox, and this year especially the cloud cover has come down like the lid on a shoe box. I did have a light-box but it was a pain to set up, and the best my – perhaps economical – lamps could emit was a weak and sickly light. So, weary with hunting for light I went out and bought some.

‘Twas pricey but it’s the bee’s knees. It gives me an adequacy, nay, an overabundance of light. Clearly, I’ll have to make some adjustments to my camera-wrangling technique to allow for that and there will be a period of learning but it’s a relief to know that I can take photos now whenever I want, and not have to wait for a brief break in the Cloud Cover of Doom that we’ve suffered all winter. By the way, those dishes on the floor belong to the cat. Best to leave them alone. She’s a Very Big Cat with a personality defect. We mostly let her have her own way.

I tried the new set-up on this handsome marbled plum/black Conway Stewart 55 and its Duro nib. The 55 and to some degree its smaller cousin the 388 seem to be pens in transition, different from their predecessors but having not yet made the decisive jump that was to come, to the baguette-shaped pens of the late forties and fifties. The 55 is less streamlined than its predecessor the 45, making it appear shorter and quite chunky, though actually they are the same length and diameter. It’s a pen designed to impress, and it does. The narrow/medium/narrow cap bands signal that this is an expensive pen, and if you don’t get the message, the big Duro nib is there to emphasise it

I never intentionally buy mechanical pencils but they turn up in job lots that I buy. I know little about them but admire their mechanical ingenuity. Often, there’s a relationship with pens by the same maker. I just clean them up and send them back out into the world, but I enjoy their colours and style.

The pencil at the top is an offering from Scripto. It has no particular value but it’s colourful and practical. It looks quite similar to a wooden pencil, to my mind.

The next one down is a handsome advertising pencil, a well-made piece. The muted colours are reminiscent of some of the patterns used by Conway Stewart in their Dinkies, which makes it possible that this is a Bina & Barrey pencil.

The third one is a Jif Waterman metal pencil, and very beautiful it is too. Much as I studied the clip, I was unable to see any resemblance to their pens.

The fourth one is a Waterman with a very broad band, clearly a relation of the Taperite. I think the pencil looks better than the pen.

The final pencil is probably the best made of them all, a Strad which incorporates a penknife blade. While it’s beautifully executed, you’re inclined to ask why? What would you be cutting with it? You have a mechanical pencil so you wouldn’t need to sharpen it… I’ve no idea where Strad pencils were made, but I’ve seen other ones, including a woodgrain MHR example that must have been at least seventy years old. It had a set of feeler gauges in case you wanted to adjust your tappets or check your spark plugs while you were sitting at your office desk. It’s one of those wonderful answers that never found a question, I think.

Here I am again! I was offline for almost a month, the longest I’ve been without an internet connection since 1993. The withdrawal symptoms were harsh, especially when I couldn’t remember some detail which I could have found out instantly by using Google. The reason I was without a connection was the old story, not really worth repeating, of an ISP gone bad. Suffice it to say that I wish bad and unrepeatable things on the senior management of TalkTalk, may they rot in heck.

I’ve spent the day updating logins and contact details for all my various accounts. I last had to do it five years ago and it seems all too soon that I’m plodding through it again. Still, it’s done now and it will be back to the pens again tomorrow.

Several of you have sent me messages backchannel and I’ll be in touch in the next few days.

Well, it looks like I won’t be back online from home until 5th January.  I suppose it’s the holidays that are the cause, but that’s the date we have from BT so that’s the date I’m stuck with.  I’ve got lots of things to post about so please bear with me through the next few weeks of silence.  I will still try to check in every few days but I don’t want to wear out my welcome at my friend’s house, using his computer, so it may be sporadic.  As before, please be patient if you do send a query – I will answer it as soon as I can.

 Wishing good holidays to all, and a great 2012 once it arrives.  

I find myself without an internet connection these days because TalkTalk are evil and must be stopped. But I think they will be stopped, seeing as how I am only one among thousands who are leaping away as far and fast as possible because they’re hopeless. Am writing from a friend’s computer but will not have much access to the internet due to impending gales which will certainly discourage me from wandering the streets of my village looking for anyone who will lend me a computer and some broadband.

So if you have sent a query or made a comment and I have not replied, please forgive! I simply can’t at this time. Hopefully within a week or ten days I’ll be back up and running… Wish me luck!

Just returned from hospital yet again!  Sparing you the gory details, I was admitted as an emergency  a week ago, but I’ve improved by leaps and bounds since then.  This is the best I’ve felt since the operation nearly six weeks ago.  If things continue like this, it won’t be long before I’m restoring pens and blogging again.