I should probably explain the name before anyone reports me.
It comes from the Dutch Pen Show, and from a customs crisis that took place entirely inside my own head.
The crime
I went with a budget and a list. I came back with neither.
This is not unusual and I won't pretend it was. Anyone who has been to a pen show knows the specific physics of the thing: you arrive intending to look, you spend time being reasonable, and then somewhere around the third table someone lets you dip a nib into something you've only ever seen photographed and the budget quietly excuses itself from the conversation.
So by the time I got back to the hotel I had ten pens I did not leave the house with. Though in fairness, only seven of those came from the show itself. The other three were acquired over the following couple of days, while we were supposedly just exploring the Netherlands — a phrase which turned out to mean P.W. Akkerman and then, inevitably, Appelboom. I would like to state for the record that I did not plan this. I would also like to state that I knew exactly where both shops were before we left England, and that these two positions are not as contradictory as they sound.
There is a photograph of them, taken in our hotel room in Utrecht, laid out along the windowsill with the canal and half the city's bicycles behind them. Ten pens, every box still with them, the light coming in soft through the rain on the glass. It is, I think, a lovely photograph.
It was taken approximately four minutes before the panic.
The plan
Because somewhere between that windowsill and the airport, I had a thought.
The thought was this: a bag full of brand-new pens, boxed, and obviously just purchased, looks like something. It looks like commerce. Whereas a bag full of pens that are visibly, unarguably already in use looks like the entirely normal luggage of an entirely normal person who simply likes to be prepared.
You can see where this is going.
I inked every single one of them. All ten. Sitting on a hotel bed with a canal outside the window, filling pens I had owned for approximately three days, so that they would look loved rather than looted.
Then I posted the boxes and the packaging home separately, because packaging is evidence.
Then I got on a plane and spent the entire flight quietly rehearsing my defence — an explanation, should anyone require one, for why a woman in her right mind travels on a flight with that many fountain pens filled and ready to write at a moment's notice.
The verdict
Nobody asked.
Nobody has ever asked. Nobody was ever going to ask. There was no crime, there was no contraband, and there was nobody at the other end remotely interested in the contents of my hand luggage. Fountain pens are not a controlled substance in any jurisdiction I'm aware of, which is frankly a failure of regulation given what they do to a person's finances.
My husband had watched the entire operation unfold with the patience of a man who has seen this sort of thing before. His contribution, delivered somewhere in the middle of it, was that nobody was going to care about my pen smuggling.
He was right. Nobody did. Nobody has.
But he'd said the words out loud, and once you've said a thing like that out loud it doesn't go away again. By the time we got home he'd started calling me the pen smuggler, and that was that.
It stuck. Of course it stuck. It was far too accurate to survive being said only once.
The name kept working
Here's the thing, though. The name outlived the story, because the smuggling never actually stopped. It just changed direction.
These days the border I'm running things across is entirely internal. It's the one between "I have quite enough ink, thank you" and "well, but that one's a different brown". Every bottle that arrives here has been smuggled past my own better judgement, which — and I want to be honest with you as a matter of principle — has never once mounted a serious defence.
Nothing to declare. Never anything to declare.
What this actually is
So: I'm a collector. That's the whole of it, and it's the bit that matters most.
The samples exist because bottles are a significant commitment to a colour you've only seen on a screen, on somebody else's paper, photographed under somebody else's lighting. I know this because I have made that commitment more times than is defensible, and I have the shelf to prove it.
Four millilitres is enough to fill a pen a few times and find out whether you actually like living with a colour, rather than whether you liked the idea of it at eleven at night. Everything I decant comes out of my own bottles. Every swatch photo is mine, on Tomoe River, done by me, unedited — which means that if a colour looks slightly less glamorous in my photos than it does on the manufacturer's website, that's not a fault, that's the point.
I'd rather you got the ink you expected than the ink I could have sold you.
And I'm always happy to talk ink. Genuinely, at length, to the mild alarm of people who ask casually. If you want to know how something behaves in a wet nib, or whether two browns are actually different browns, or whether a shimmer is worth the flushing — ask. That conversation is most of why I do this.
Nothing to declare.
But quite a lot to recommend.
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