No holds bard

I'm eternally amazed at the way all the things I do mesh together, even though it happens all the time. So it's quite hard to pick a point where this sequence of events can be said to have started, but let's say it was on the sewing and crafts Discord server a few weeks ago, where a bunch of us were talking about pens in the off-topic channel. (It's not even that off-topic, to be honest, because we did touch quite heavily on calligraphy, and that is a craft. Or maybe an art. But it certainly fits in with the general milieu.)

I caused a considerable amount of puzzlement when I said I'd been finding it hard to get hold of a fountain pen. Someone even asked me what on earth I was talking about; she said they were very easy to get in the UK. I said, no, not so; every time I do a search for a fountain pen, all I get is cartridge pens. The reply to that was "but those are fountain pens".

OK, so the language has changed on me again while I wasn't looking. When I was a child, there were fountain pens, which you filled from a bottle and which were for adults because Children Would Make A Mess, and there were cartridge pens, which at that point were generally fairly cheap and nasty, and which were for older children as a kind of reluctant compromise. (Children were not supposed to write with a ballpoint because They Would Ruin Your Writing, which was another obvious grown-up lie. There was no way a ballpoint could ruin anyone's writing; it was effectively just like using a pencil, and we had to use those up to the age of about 10. With hindsight, I think it was actually to do with the fact that you didn't give children decent pens, and cheap ballpoints had a tendency to blot, and the ink was hard to wash out of things. So that was probably what that lie was about.) In the top two years of primary school we had to have a cartridge pen, much to the annoyance of my parents, who didn't believe in buying things that were specifically meant for children if it could possibly be avoided. They thought we ought to have to wait till we were deemed old enough to use a fountain pen. That was the early 1970s.

Fast-forward a few years to my teens, by which point I'd decided I didn't like cartridge pens because it was a very expensive way to buy ink, plus you couldn't do anything with used cartridges other than throw them out; even at the time, that seemed like a waste. However, cartridge pens had improved a great deal, and by that stage there were suddenly a lot of cartridge pens around that an adult wouldn't be ashamed to be caught using - unless they were my dad, of course, who, once he had an idea installed in his head, was not very good at uninstalling it to make way for something more appropriate to changed circumstances. I acquired a fountain pen - can't remember whether I bought it or was given it, but at any rate I was much happier with it. It was one of those with a squeezy bulb, so it did leak a bit on the inside after a while, but as long as it didn't leak on the paper I was not too unhappy.

So, back to the discussion on Discord. I was recommended a shop called Cult Pens, which, I was reliably informed, had everything; so I went and looked, and it did, but I had a lot of trouble finding a pen you filled with ink from a bottle, even though they did sell a lot of bottled ink. There were cartridge pens which could be converted, but you had to buy a separate converter for those. I wanted one that just natively filled from a bottle. In the end, in some frustration, I e-mailed them, and I got a very nice reply saying that what I wanted was now called a "piston-filler" (even if it actually filled using a squeezy bulb and not a piston). And, after some thought, I bought one, along with a bottle of "Little Pip" ink, which was advertised as purple with a gold sheen. Because if you're going to buy bottled ink, you may as well get something you can't buy in cartridges.

The day before that arrived, I attended my first SCA online bardic session. I didn't know what to expect, but I thought there'd be more people, so I was planning to keep quiet and listen the first time round while I got the idea of it. But no; there were four of us. Two singing Swedes, one American who did magic tricks, and me. That meant I really had to participate. I started off trying to sing 'Tis true, 'tis day, but without the usual lute; but I corpsed in the middle of that, so I need to practise it before I try it again. Next time round I did The Death of Queen Jane, which mostly went well but I pitched it about a semitone too low. I'm normally very comfortable at the low end of my range, but this has twiddles! And on the final round I did Ringsend Rose, because honestly you cannot go wrong with an Irish song... and I didn't. During the course of that, I not only had a lot of fun, but I found that "bardic" in the SCA covers all kinds of entertainment, not just music; there were the magic tricks, of course, but storytelling and poetry recitation are also very popular.

And I can do those. In particular, I can do the poetry recitation. I write poetry, because of course I do (it would be very odd if I just translated other people's and never wrote my own); and some of it is extremely suitable for the SCA. Like this one, for instance.

Well, it just so happens that I'm going to the Crown Tournament in October, because someone else locally is going and can take me. For the uninitiated, the Crown Tournament is to decide who is going to be king and queen for the next six months (we have short-term royalty in the SCA, which I think is a grand way of doing things if you're going to have royalty); it involves a lot of people in heavily padded armour beating seven bells out of each other with sticks and then having a jolly good knees-up afterwards, while the rest of us look on, cheer as appropriate, and do various non-martial activities. I expect I'll bring the netting. And they will probably want some bards. And it also just so happens that I have just bought a notebook to take to Crown, which was originally for the purpose of keeping my journal so I don't have to schlep the laptop over there; and therefore, at the moment, I am copying out the clever horse poem into the front of this notebook so I can recite it if and when anyone goes "bards?". I will try to get it off by heart in time for the tournament, but it'll be useful to have a crib sheet even if I do. After all, I thought I had 'Tis true, 'tis day by heart, but once you sing it in front of an audience it's all a bit different.

So I used the new pen, naturally enough; and I'm delighted with it. It is even smoother to write with than my regular rollerballs, which is saying something. The ink turns out to be quite a subtle purple, roughly the purple equivalent of Quink blue-black; I can't see the sheen on this paper, but that is probably because the paper is too absorbent. The Cult Pens website helpfully explains that sheen ink won't sheen properly if it is soaked into the paper too fast. It has to sit on top of the paper and dry slowly. But I'll try a different paper, and in the meantime it's still a very nice ink.

Have fountain pen, will travel...