Politics and cooking

German politics

Let’s start with a photo I got from Henrik. You can see the pencils Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is using: Faber-Castell Grip 2001s. [1]Did you know that the official way of addressing her is “Your excellency”?

Angela Merkel's pencils (Image © Bundesregierung / Steffen Kugler)
Angela Merkel’s pencils (Image © Bundesregierung / Steffen Kugler)

British politics

Meanwhile, in the UK the House of Lords decided that they would stop using vellum (goat or calf skin) for printing laws. It looks as if the Cabinet Office minister will now offer to pay the cost (around £80,000 a year) to keep this tradition alive. You can read more about it at the Guardian. Just to avoid any confusion, vellum is parchment made from animal skin, but vellum paper or paper vellum is not. You might have come across vellum paper on Rhodia notepads (High Grade Vellum Paper), but it’s synthetic and not made from animal skin. Rhodia Drive wrote about this a few months ago.

Rhodia High Grade Vellum Paper
Rhodia High Grade Vellum Paper

British cooking

Staying in the UK: In Rick Stein’s Taste of Shanghai you can see him making notes using a pencil. At first glance I thought it is a Caran d’Ache 844, but after rewinding and looking again I think it’s a Pentel P209 (0.9mm) mechanical pencil.

Rick Stein's pencil (Image © Denhams / BBC) - a Pentel P209
Rick Stein’s pencil (Image © Denhams / BBC)

I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post, falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

References

References
1 Did you know that the official way of addressing her is “Your excellency”?

3 thoughts on “Politics and cooking”

  1. Pingback: Just another pen ?!Blick über den Tellerrand vom 20. February 2016 - Just another pen ?!

  2. Stationery Traffic

    I can confirm that Rick is using a P209 in the screenshot. He is sometimes seen with a notebook and pen in his TV series but I don’t remember him using a pencil before.

  3. Thanks for the confirmation and for your comment. It looks as if yellow = 0.9mm.
    I don’t remember seeing pencils in his shows in the past, so I was happy to see a pencil this time. His writing seems very big, so 0.9mm is probably a good choice for him.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.