What’s the one luxury you can’t live without?
The one luxury I can’t live without is a good fountain pen.
Not because it is expensive, rare or prestigious, but because it shapes the pace and quality of my thinking. A fountain pen flows at walking pace or a jog, whereas I type at a sprint.
It gives words weight and soul. It turns note-taking into reflection and drawing into fixed observation. And I like my workings out on the page.
I use fountain pens for everything: diary entries, sketches of trees, story ideas, swim sets, council notes, maps, annotations in books, sudden memories, fragments of dialogue, dreams.
Different pens suit different moods and or tasks. I have yellow, red, white and black. Black I use for pen and ink drawing exclusively.
In a digital world where everything is instant, disposable and potentially AI initiated, influenced or infiltrated, a fountain pen is physical, analogue and permanent. I have a postcard written in fountain pen from my father in January when he was 17 in January 1949. I have my own diaries and notebooks that have lasted forty years or more. I can’t say that for content on floppy discs, CDs and external storage blocks!
Written in ink leaves evidence of pressure, hesitation, speed, emotion. You can tell when someone was tired, excited, angry or absorbed simply from the line itself.
A keyboard records information. A fountain pen records presence.
I suspect that’s why I return to it constantly — whether writing fiction, analysing dreams, planning woodland surveys or sketching beside a swimming pool. The pen becomes both tool and companion: part thinking device, part memory machine.
If all luxuries vanished tomorrow, I would still want good paper, cartridge ink (pricey!) and a fountain pen that had already learned the shape of my hand.
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