Wanted to thank Conway Stewart pens @BespokeBritish1 for delivery of my Winston fountain pen - a refreshingly large pen. I am aware graphophiles follow me & can strongly recommend Conway Stewart, which we have used across generations, esp if you prefer broad nibs #FountainPens
Only thing better than a new fountain pen is rebuilding an old pen from parts - all my years learning about gunnery, riflery & like naval trades helped me repair my late mother's 1980s Dunhill fountain pen, which writes very well again. #FountainPens
This ink well was made from the timber of HMAS Sydney (1), which destroyed the German raider SMS Emden in the Battle of the Cocos Islands in 1914. #fountainpens
This is my late mother's Parker 51 from when she was a young convent girl and then at university. Still works with the original bladder and writes very smoothly. I use it a good deal.
Some of these were my late parents' pens and some are mine - Conway Stewart, Montblanc, Faber-Castell, Schaeffer, Parker, Lamy, Parker ... all do a very good job. Conway Stewart & Montblanc do cater for the broad nib aficionado #fountainpens
I bought this Pilot broad nib fountain pen in January 2020 (just before the pandemic) while in Kyoto and it is a flawless pen to write with - a veritable Lexus of the written word with perfect balance and Japanese precision
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Wallabies had a good first 30 but then made mistakes and England made us pay. Wallabies have to stop conceding stupid penalties and treasure possession. We also still do not have a reliable scrum … after almost 20 years
Also @wwos@StanSportRugby no one cares about the human interest stuff when the Wallabies are losing. Win a World Cup and then you can do all the touchy - feely nonsense you want.
Small informal poll of Tory family in the UK .... a certain sense of vexation if also resignation at the mostly uninspiring field running for Conservative leader. I am sensing this is not unique to us.
Leading a Right of centre parliamentary party is hard - too many MPs today are political vagabonds who would have been as happy in the LibDems (Tom Tugendhat and Liz Truss) or who would agree much more with Keir Starmer than the average conservative voter (Penny Mordaunt).
Will only add here to @pegobry 's insightful post that even if you served from day 1 in the Royal Navy/British Expeditionary Force during the Great War until the armistice in Nov 1918, at best you could get 3 medals: the 1914 Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal.
Would add further to this that lurking in every western military’s thinking is the worry that everything has been dumbed down and compromised - not just for woke reasons - that the military machine is not what it was esp after 20+ years of hopeless wars amid very leadership
One reviled & one celebrated.
One fired & one rewarded by the establishment.
One a genius whose work is still studied & the other pleaded guilty.
Somehow, in less than 2 years, Joe Biden's advanced age, obvious fragility & diminished mental sharpness, went from something no media could discuss to front page news .... there is a liberal media game afoot here ... and even so, he is better than Harris nytimes.com/2022/07/09/us/…
Not even waiting for a Democratic mid term disaster to push Biden into not running and going into the political equivalent of “managed care”
England forwards are almost always large and devastating when on their game … Wallabies seem to have inexplicably underestimated them from a simple line out move #Wallabies
#Wallabies need to keep it simple …somehow England pilfer at the line out and now give away the penalties … shades of bad old days #AUSvsENG
Having watched a few Poirots this winter, it seems your chances of surviving inter-war Britain went up markedly if you, generally, avoided weekends at country houses but, if you must escape to the country, you avoided walking at night in the grounds without your service revolver.
Also, Poirot, a Belgian Catholic, has a habit of running into very observant and very helpful CofE ministers, who noted crucial aspects of the murderer (or his/her relevant whore, hiding evidence), which I put down to the easy familiarity born of the Malines Conversations.
One feels for Captain Hastings when watching Poirot. Hastings is a literal archetype that did exist, along with Bulldog Drummond etal. If you are an Anglo, you very likely had someone in your family for whom WW1 was a good war & everything after, something of a disappointment.