Do I need to buy another bottle of Quink?

Reaching the stage of life where I begin to ask will I ever use/do/need to buy that again?

By Vivien Jones

It’s not the idea of death, dying or fatal illness, his or mine, that arrests me.

It’s when my four year old granddaughter wants to try a feather quill and I look

for some ink only to find just a drop or two left in my last bottle. These days a

perfectly ordinary bottle of Quink costs costs five pounds and I find myself

wondering — will I use it all ? Then I look in my stationary drawer and find

more ball pens, fineliners, Parkers, Paper Mates, Platignum and Sheaffers

than I will ever use – a monument to my lifelong addiction to writing and

drawing – that may well dry up due to neglect.

Photo by Vivien Jones

There are bigger things. Our road bikes with their untrendy drop handles and

skinny wheels, the bikes we rode all the lanes and tracks of Galloway as we

tracked each others’ affections. They rest side by side, under tarpaulins

by the side of the shed and must surely be rusting though we daren’t look.

Sometimes we look at the swish electric models in the bike shop, priced in

the high hundreds, and would appreciate their fat tyres, comfy saddles and

easy gears but we won’t do it. And we won’t be sending ours to the dump

even though we have become devoted to our series of Volvos, love their

reach, love their comfortable lack of fashion. We won’t be disposing of such

an affectionate past.

And yet what are those who come to clear up after us to make of such

collections of things that once had purpose and significance, but now just fill

drawers to brimming, with nothing but our memories to make sense of them?

They may keep the Kodak photographs though, heaven knows, we now all

keep such endless archives of our lives online. But there’s something about

the faded colours of a square print taken on a Brownie 127 (my twelfth

birthday present 1960) — its very rarity having so much more significance

than its subject which is a potential boy friend in a park in Oreston, Devon.

As I remember it, he was more interested that I also had half a crown to spend on

sweets, but, whatever he’s done since, I still have his photo and a memory of me

fancying myself a photographer on the day that I got that camera, how it felt to

click that shutter and wind the film on.

I am the only one left of our tight little family – mother and father, sister and

brother all dead and remembered well only in our youth, so sundered were

we in the passing years. I was the oddball child, neither beautiful nor

charming, but one who thrashed on through the years with health and mind

intact. It is only now when a nearly spent bottle of Quink has made me

wonder how much longer? that I accept that I am finite too.