At the end of January I won an eBay auction for a joblot of Lamy pens and so this fortnight rotation has been focused on using them - a whole Safari safari, if you will

I have more pens than I do hands (significantly more) and I want to write about them. These aren’t reviews; more pensive thoughts, or inky meditations

If you’re looking for nib measurements and posting lengths, you’ll want to look elsewhere

If you want to know why a grown adult gets unreasonably excited about a pen that’s marketed to schoolchildren, you’re in the right place

But first, let me tell you about Pokémon

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I was never much of a Pokémon fan as a kid. Being born in the late 90s meant I kinda missed the train for being into the card games and I never ended up watching it on TV

Instead, I played an old GameBoy game called Dragon Warrior Monsters, which (in my opinion) had much better gameplay

So I’m not exactly knowledgeable, but I know two important things about Pokémon. First: there’s an electric yellow cat that people quite like. Second: you have to choose between three starter creatures when you begin your adventure

People diving into a new hobby are often faced with this same “what do I start with” decision. If Nintendo suddenly swapped out electric cats and water turtles for fountain pens (probably best not to mix those two; sounds like a fire hazard), the Lamy Safari would absolutely be one of the starter options

As it would happen, I actually owned a Safari about five years before I got my first pen that kickstarted this whole stationery obsession. I don’t remember how I came across it; I think I inherited it from someone at school

It didn’t stick as I didn’t realise at the time that Lamy used proprietary cartridges, and couldn’t figure out why the standard international ones I was trying to pop in wouldn’t work

Still, it shows how deep the Safari is ingrained in this hobby. It was my zero pen. The one before the one

It took me a full decade after properly diving into the stationery hobby to finally circle back and get a Safari. And as they say, when it rains it pours; I won an eBay auction and scored six for twenty quid

Not just fountain pens (of which there are three) but also a mechanical pencil, rollerball, and ballpoint - the whole shebang!

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A Tale of Five Pens and a Broken Mechanical Pencil

Fountain Pens

Charcoal Black

Ink: Diamine Syrah

Most Safaris come with a silver steel nib, but this one has a black coated nib to match the rest of the pen, which looks properly sleek against the matte body

The nib ran a bit dry when I first got it, which is typical of both black-coated nibs and pens that you get for a good price on eBay. A rinse with soapy water sorted it out and it turns out to be a rather wet writer

Occasionally I will hit what I call a crispy angle; a slight misalignment where the ink doesn’t lay down uniformly. Whether this is a user-error or a characteristic of the black coating, I’m unsure. It’s not enough to upset me, however

The nib is broad, which isn’t my usual preference, but I’ve come around to it. There’s some nice feedback there. Again, I think, from the black coating

Coral

Ink: Diamine Twilight

A pinkish pen that reminds me of a Monzo card

I think this one is my favourite of the fountain pens as I really like the colour, though it has me thinking that a bright pink one would suit me very well.. I’d quite like to hotswap it with a royal blue barrel

Very me

I slightly regret inking this with Diamine Twilight because it doesn’t really do the rest of the pen much justice. Next time I will choose something with a bit more punch in it to match - Noodler’s Dragon’s Napalm would be a very good choice

[Dragons Napalm placeholder]

Hey Now, You’re an Al-Star

Ink: Diamine Eau de Nil

Here’s my confession: I prefer the Safari over the Al-Star. The Safari looks more down to earth; the Al-Star seems like it’s trying a little too hard

Literally too polished

This pen arrived with a slight defect as the barrel can slide out of the inner sleeve. This was particularly annoying while writing as the pen would rest against my hand and the barrel would then slowly slide off

I fixed this by putting some washi tape around the section to hold it in place. I had to get the positioning exact; too low and the cap wouldn’t click on properly, but too high and you would be unable to unscrew to access the converter

The process only took two tries so it wasn’t too laborious (or wasteful of precious washi)

The bright pink tape actually looks quite cool against the reddish-pink body

Non-Fountain Pens

Ballpoint (Vista)

I referenced demonstrator pens in the Jinhao 9019 post, but I’d never used a demonstrator ballpoint before

Unless you count the Bic Cristal

(lol)

The Lamy M16 refill stands out in this pen as it’s quite chonky, and with its all metallic design, makes a statement

The ink contained within it, however, does not leave much of an impact and writes what I call a “rusty” line

This is a term I decided upon when I was 8 years old and I’ve been using it to describe a pen that writes a line that isn’t that consistent; a bit washed out or dry

As such, I’ll probably be swapping in the M17 refill (which uses Uniball’s Jetstream ink) to elevate the writing experience. I really like the transparent design of the Vista and I would get a lot of use out of this pen with a nicer ink

I’ll probably have to take out a loan for this however because a single refill is GBP10…

I believe you get what you pay for, though

Rollerball

In the package was also a red rollerball. Unlike the ballpoint, the ink in this is pretty spectacular. It’s a very wet ink and I have had occasions where, due to being left handed, I’ve smudged the writing

So wet and smooth that it didn’t take me long to realise how easy it is to stain a pair of grey joggers if you’re not careful while this pen is uncapped

Design-wise the rollerballs look identical to the fountain pens, but you can tell which is which as the FPs have a ‘+’ on the finial, while the rollerballs have a ‘-‘

I hope having a minus sign, while your fountain pen cousins have a plus, on its finial doesn’t give the rollerball models an inferiority complex

Mechanical Pencil

Of all the writing utensils I won as part of this auction, the mechanical pencil was perhaps the one I was most excited to use

My excitement turned to disappointment pretty quickly, as the mechanism doesn’t work and the lead won’t extend when you click

I’ve disassembled, reassembled, and repeated (about ninety five million times) to no avail; it seems the clutch mechanism holding the lead is broken

When you do get a little bit of lead poking its head out, like a turtle coming out of its shell, the pressure against the page will push it right back in again

…like a nervous snail

The eBay auction gods giveth and taketh away in equal measure, and when the seller writes “untested/sold as seen” in the description, there ain’t much you can do about it!

A shame; I don’t know what made me so giddy about this, perhaps because I don’t have many mechanical pencils so it was a bit more novel to me

The only mechanical pencil that I do own is the Kuru Toga

The saving grace is that there’s a rumour that Lamy (now owned by Mutsibushi, which is why we’ve also got the Jetstream refill for ballpoints) will be making the mechanical pencil version of this with the Kuru Toga system

Which, honestly, is cool as fuck

Shame that this pencil won’t work, but I’ll definitely be getting one with the KT system when they come out

I’m unsure how this will be integrated into the design, but fingers crossed it would be easy to swap barrels so that I can have a bit of customisability, even if one of the pencils doesn’t actually work

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Get a Grip!

When discussing the Lamy Safari, you’re inevitably going to get into the Safar/Al-Star debate, or the conversation about the grip design The final thing that I’ll mention about these pens is the grip

I hold my pens like an utter degenerate. I don’t know what happened in my early school years, perhaps I had chicken pox the day it was being taught, but I never learned how to hold a pen correctly

I remember seeing classmates with these weird rubber grips on their pencils, but for some reason I never got one and so, as a result, I hold my pen like a caveman probably would

Maybe it was to do with the fact I am left handed and there wasn’t a left handed gripper for me to use?

I’m pretty agnostic to the whole grip debate on most pens; the only grip section I’ve not gotten on with was the TWSBI Vac 700, because those grooves were sharp!

The grip on these pens doesn’t seem to bother me. It isn’t comfortable, but not exactly uncomfortable either; I just get on with it

hashtag stoic

I do seriously need to reconsider how I grip a pen however. As I write hooked and have such a tight grip on the pen, writing for long periods of time can get pretty uncomfortable and I’m sure it’s going to fuck up my wrist later in life if I don’t

Maybe a dedicated period with the Lamy Safari will sort that out

The Starter, Revised

I mentioned in a previous post that 2026 feels like a “use what you have” kind of year. Price increases, reassessing what’s worth spending money on; all that

But there’s another angle to it. Sometimes using what you have means revisiting the stuff you overlooked. The starter pen. The zero pen. The one that was there before you even knew this was going to become a thing

The Safari isn’t flashy. It isn’t rare. It won’t impress anyone at a pen meetup

But it’s been around since 1980 for a reason. And sometimes the thing that’s been there all along still has something to teach you

(Like how to hold a pen)