What a shame – my local pen shop, Platts of Preston, will cease trading end of next week. I bought a few nice pens there and my wife’s favourite pen for years, the Lamy Pico, was bought there. I overheard the shopkeeper telling another customer that the new lease for the shop would cost £800 per week – which might be acceptable for some locations, but to me sounds ridiculously expensive for a shop that is in the location this shop is in a city the size of Preston.
They will continue to trade at plattspens.co.uk and I wish them the best of luck for their future.
Today: a blog post with images all over the place.
This weekend’s 56th annual Eurovision Song Contest is over. With an estimated 125 Million viewers watching it is a big event, but even though it is quite big in Europe not many people outside Europe [1]…or better: outside the “European Broadcasting Area”, which includes many non-European countries, that participate in the contest would probably know about it [2]Australia might be an exception. Not only is it shown there, viewers can even vote, even though their vote does not count.. Nevertheless, the contest even seems to inspire politicians: a few years ago Putin proposed a similar Asiavision Song Contest.
While watching the final this weekend I was kind of expecting that Jimmy Jump would invade the stage again – like during last year’s Eurovision final and during the Football world cup final – but there was no sight of him…
Moldova’s entry was funny-ish, but I thought it was nowhere near as good as the (kind of) similar entry from the Ukraine in 2007. It also somehow reminded me of a Knorkator song that made it into the German national finals in 2000. …and a last comment before I stop writing about Eurovision: what a shame that Switzerland did not get more votes. I thought their song was really nice (even though the singer should not have moved her arm so much).
Düller notepads
John Lewis Door Stop
Other things I did this weekend, except watching the Eurovision Song Contest, included going to Manchester’s Trafford Centre. In John Lewis I saw a pencil shaped door stop for £25 (~$40; ~€29), but even more interesting than this was Pedlars in Selfridges. They sold Düller memo pads, including the long version featured in pencil talk’s recent Düller Memo Pad post …but unfortunately, they did not have the dotted version in stock. When I was in Pedlars a few weeks ago they still sold the Düller mechanical pencil that comes “in” a note pad, but this time only the sample was left (which is probably not for sale and was slightly damaged).
Oops - Upside down
Ships!
I bought a nautical stationery set by SORT, The Society Of Revisionist Typographers, despite the name obviously a company, not a society. When I bought it I didn’t know yet, but a quick search on the Internet revealed that this set was featured in a UK newspaper’s 2009 Christmas gift guide. I am not so keen on the nautical theme, but the paper and printing were nice enough to convince me to buy this stationery set.
Something else I discovered this weekend, this time in Homesense in Preston: nice leather bound notebooks from Gallery Leather, printed in Korea (so I assume the paper is Korean, too) and bound in Maine, USA. All the journals I looked were very well made and at around £8 (~$13; ~€9) they were also very reasonably priced. I assume you can also find them at T.K. Maxx / T. J. Maxx, since they belong to the same company.
Something else I discovered this weekend, this time in Homesense in Preston: nice leather bound notebooks from