There's nothing worse than a fountain pen that works intermittently! There's usually caked ink somewhere in the feed from the barrel to the nib. You can flush it out with warm water and it sometimes works - but not this one! And I can't pull the nib out either : it seems to have been sealed in.
I've been making a new wooden barrel for this pen, carved and lovingly polished, but it's disappointing to find that the point of it is useless (no pun intended). I suppose I could just use it as a dip-in pen . . . I'll keep on trying . . .
I's wonderful to still have all the hand-written songbooks I've collected over my lifetime. I started to put them in school exercise books when I was thirteen. All the skiffle songs we sang in the Zephyrs group, a lot of Hank Williams songs and a few of my own attempts at proto-songwriting. I have at least fifteen of them and I still use them to refresh my memory. Then I went on to typed songs in ring-binders, and I have two or three of them stuffed with scripts, sketches and songs Ed Bloomfield and I wrote for the radio. It's splendid to find a long-neglected ballad in an old song-book and resurrect it. I'm quite good at recalling the melodies, but sometimes I just write new tunes. I must have written nearly a thousand songs in my lifetime, some pretty useless but others worth a whirl. There appears to be a decade in a songsmith's life when he's writing memorable things. It gets harder the older you get (it seems to me).
Ninety-nine per cent of songs are about love and loss. I can see why, but I've grown out of that genre. I'd rather write songs of disasters, or nature, or surreal fantasy.Not much good for your average pop song! I prefer a declamatory style of singing, raw and without affectation or undue mannerisms. Then again, I left popular music behind a long time ago.
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