The pen shop in St Davids is literally called The Pen Shop The one in Royal Arcade is called The Pen and Paper
Refillable double length cartridge and bottle ink is easy living imo, that's all I use now. I can't find the cartridge I use online ATM though. It's the one with a press-down metal tab. So its capacity is actually about 2 standard cartridges, unlike the syringe designs where half the length of the pen is wasted on the syringe plunger.
Not being a tw@ and trying to swallow something as large as a pen cap that a) shouldn't be in your mouth anyway and b) has to go through several safeguards first - like your tongue - before getting jammed, will also put a stop to pen cap swallowing. Not directed at you, by the way. Just broadly including all children. Not that you're a child either. I'll stop there. You can get screw ones that are a bit smaller. But only a bit, mind. Way back in the dawn of time when I started at senior school, I used to grip a ballpoint so hard it dented my knuckles. I switched to a fountain pen for my papyrus and never looked back. For some reason, one day I decided to lever out the ball of the roll-on deodorant in my PE kit to see more about what it was. It bounced, with a hollow noise and had a seam around it. So I used some sort of awl to ream out a hole to see what was inside. Nothing, it turned out. Just a hollow plastic ball that no longer bounced because the shell tension had just had a hole put in it. I'm still not really sure what I was expecting. A minute or so later, my pen ran out, so the idea of a ball within a ball became suddenly fascinating. I think I was in English Lit doing Hamlet at the time, you see. So putting the shaky ball from my now empty ink cartridge (which I opened using a scalpel I should not have had in my pencil case at all) into the deodorant ball made a wonderful, if small, rattle. Obviously the scientific part of me took over and I wondered how long it would take to fill the deodorant ball with fountain pen cartridge balls and how many there would be. For this reason, I spent the rest of my fountain pen career avoiding ink that did not have a ball with it. In fact, I used to go nuts when I dropped a ball on the floor and couldn't find it. Inconceivably cross, as I then had ages to wait until I got through another cartridge. Sometimes I used to colour in pages of my exercise book to get there quicker. Parker cartridges were a no as they just had a crappy plastic nipple on the front. And at this point in time, we only had those funny metal and rubber squeezy reservoirs. For obvious school reasons, carrying a bottle of ink around was also a no, because people used to end up wearing it. And there's a reason we used it to give ourselves tattoos. In fact, the only downside to fountain pen ink is unless you get the special black-green stuff (and possibly some other colours I haven't discovered) that is almost indelible, any leakage in your bag results in you losing months of work. Even as an adult. But I digress. I eventually found out how long it takes to fill said roll-on deodorant ball full of ink cartridge balls. Barring a brief period where I forgot all about it and didn't use my fountain pen - maybe at university (can't remember), but more likely when I started work in an office and stationery was both free and anything shiny used to go missing overnight, so no point taking my pen to work - the answer is nearly four decades. I found this out within the last year when I could no longer squeeze any more in. So stage one complete. I have not yet opened it up to count them in order to satisfy stage two, nor have I thought of a way to do so. But I am happy I achieved this somewhat pointless milestone before it became a deathbed regret. I will of course, keep you updated if I manage to get to some sort of number.
YO I DID THE SAME GODDAMN THING I gave up after collecting about 30, though. They were so tiny I couldn't fathom how much writing I'd have to do to actually fill a container (mine were in a medicine vial). I still wonder if you could just find the Chinese supplier that manufactures the teeny tiny balls, and buy an industrial quantity of them. I suppose....I suppose I'm a grown up now, and nobody can stop me doing that...
Pfft. Amateur. That's the trouble with you kids (and my ex) - no commitment. the answer is nearly forty years' worth though. I'll admit you didn't help your objective by choosing a fairly large container, so your milestone may indeed have been waaay further out than mine and/or more seemingly insurmountable. But in your case, it would be cheating. And you wouldn't get the same sense of satisfaction. My advice would be to restart your mission now and refuse to use a keyboard for basic tasks like "sending mail". You could also use an encyclopaedia and take notes, instead of Wiki-pasting. And offer to write the minutes up manually from our soon-to-be-formed fountain pen ball OCD club.
I REALLY like the idea of taking the minutes in a meeting and then posting the hand written messages. Kinda like an eff you to those now using AIs to take notes...
Whenever an incident is raised at work, our support teams use "AI" tools to generate summaries from the various Teams discussions/threads, and to summarise the calls where the incident is discussed. When I'm involved in these things, I can summarise the issue in a few minutes on a call and I can write it up within a few short paragraphs. No matter what the audience is; whether it's the 'dummies version' for senior management, or the highly technical people who know what the obscure error messages mean. But the "AI" summaries are an absolute unadulterated Gish-gallop of word-vomit. I refuse to read it. I quite literally do not have the time to read it.
I live in Wales, I work in Wales with Welsh people. AI can't understand the Welsh accent, and produces utter rubbish most of the time - it takes longer to edit into something useful than it would to do it by hand in the first place.
Yet it doesn’t seem to struggle with some of the very strong Indian accents of people I work with… There’s a bit of a paucity of strong Welsh accents where I work, but that’s not unusual for a “fintech” company in Cardiff. Mine isn’t particularly strong because… various reasons… but I make a conscious effort to avoid “code switching” my accent these days. I did it for so long without even realising I was doing it.
