I have a very strange addiction: pens.

I must have over a hundred pens, and every time I enter a stationer shop I can’t help myself: I have to buy another one.
Of course I have my profession to blame (I am an ARCHITECT! I have to have MORE PENS!!), but secretly I totally admit that it must be some sort of mental problem.
They do take up quite a lot of space by now (not to mention the hassle of moving them over and over again), and I do confess that I don’t really use them on a daily basis.
Thus, my husband wants me to throw them away (what a silly idea!) or store them in the basement (what use would they have there??). But, sorry to say, I can’t part from them.

The crown on my extensive pen collection is a present that my husband gave me about 4 years ago: a beautiful Mont Blanc fountain pen, made of black resin and with platinum-plated details.

A beautiful gift, that I am almost too afraid to use (meaning, put in my handbag). I tend to be kind of clumsy to start with, and after having a couple of children I live in a permanent foggy state of mind which, next to putting the nappies in the fridge, could easily mean leaving the pen behind everywhere.
(I once spent one sweaty hour frantacilly trying to locate the guy behind the desk of the John Lewis Technology department. I came home and just couldn’t find the pen in my bag, and I knew I left it there. ‘What do you mean you didn’t find it????’ – only to recover the pen in a secret corner of my too messy handbag after all. Ouch).

Needless to say I was desperate when my Mont Blanc pen went lost for months. The last time I used it was for addressing the envelopes of my baby’s birth announcement, but since then it had completely vanished from the earth. And I looked everywhere.
Yesterday, ten months later, we were working on emptying the last boxes from the move (there’s just no end to it!), and what does my husband-dear fish out of the London AZ??
Tadaaa, my pen. Yes!

xxx Esther