Joy: They are inexpensive
Pain: It takes weeks for them to arrive.
Joy: It arrives and you have completely forgotten that you ordered a Wing Sung 698
So, after ordering weeks and weeks ago, it arrived. It is pretty - a demonstrator type (my preferred kind of pen at the moment) with silver coloured trim.
The cap has got a nice silvery pattern on the finial and reads Wing S (plus some Chinese characters) and 698 and on the clip it says LUCKY. Ha! More of that later.
Wing Sung 698 and writing sample
Transparent feed and section - purty, ain't it?
It's a piston-filer. I must be getting more adept at filling pens because I managed to ink it up with some Astorquiza Rot from Robert Oster and not turn the bathroom into a facsimile of a slaughter house. I was immediately taken with the fact that I could see the shine of the ink shade in the feed and section as well as in the barrel. This means that your pen will look different every time you ink it up in a new colour!
How did it write? A nice fine nib produced a nice fine line with no hiccups or spotting or anything unpleasant at all. The only downside for me is that the cap cannot be posted onto the pen body. And I like keeping my pen and cap together.
Does that nib look like a baby's bum to you? It seems to, on camera - but it writes nicely, I promise you. It's a fine nib and I think that it's steel.
So, I popped the pen into my handbag along with a few others and headed off to visit my mother. I wrote a couple of pages of journal notes with the handful of pens that I carried in my bag. The Wing Sung was lovely to use and to look at. I believe that it is 'inspired' by the TWSBI Eco.
Cut to a couple of days later when I decide that I wanted to fill it with one of the Diamine Shimmer Ink samples that I had been sent.
Reader, I could not find it anywhere.
The office was turned upside down. Which is always fraught because I never get around to putting everything back. So my office ends up untidier than when I started.
I took my handbag and completely emptied it. I returned all the pens to the pen stand. No Wing Sung. Still, at least I managed to get rid of a lot of receipts from the fluff at the bottom of my bag.
The hunt continued for a few more days. Sometimes with me getting out of bed at nearly midnight to explore a pocket or a drawer that the pen might somehow have ended up in.
Nowhere. The pen was nowhere.
The last place that I saw it had been my handbag. I turned my bag upside down for a second time, shaking out crumbs, orphaned pennies and paperclips but no pen.
'Look,' said Tartarus kindly (but a little exasperatedly) was it an expensive pen? If not, go and order another one. I can't be doing with you 'tidying' up and looking for it. The house is a mess.'
So I ordered myself another one.
Then I put all thoughts of the Wing Sung to one side and got on with my work. This work involved going to the post office.
In the post office, I pulled my purse out of my bag and in one of the side pockets, I could see a plastic pen glinting. Surely, it couldn't be?
Reader, it was. The Wing Sung WAS IN MY HANDBAG.
Had it been there all along?! How was that even possible after being tipped out onto the carpet. TWICE.
I marched home and asked Tartarus and an equally bemused Sonshine whether they had removed the pen from my bag and then hidden it again before I went to the post office. My son pointed out that if he had wanted to gaslight me, it wouldn't be with a fountain pen. My husband pointed out that he wouldn't have urged me to buy a replacement if he'd purloined the original one for a joke.
Oh yeah, the replacement. It's a Wing Sung 618. It will arrive the week before Christmas. So, like I said at the beginning .... LUCKY ;D
