Safari Fountain Pen

Loving it !!

I've already owned a Safari fountain pen, and decided another Safari fountain pen (a green one this time). The fountain pen with a medium nib write well and smoothly on paper.

I bought myself a fountain pen the other day. A German model/make a 'Lamy' Safari a bright green one. It's made of plastic the very same plastic they make Lego's out of...ABS plastic. And I reckon if I stood on it with bare feet it would be just as painful...ouch, ouch, ouch...as a Lego piece underfoot. This Lamy is bright green with a smooth polish and high sheen. Feels nice in the grip...has a triangular lower body...that sits comfortably within my fingers. I am right handed, have big hands, sausage fingers that are almost as big as Cheese Kranskys...wait maybe as big as Kabana sausages! The Lamy sits comfortably in my hand, gripped between the bottom of my index finger and top of my thumb up against the side of my middle finger...nicely snug around the Lamy's lower triangle shape. It's designed well and I've had some shocker uncomfortable triangle designs in my time, and I have seen some absolute grip shockers in my time as well. Like a coppiced tree with a single branch, for a pen, sticking out on top of a knuckled tree trunck... Or like a hand tightly fisted...a fleshy ball of all tight white knuckles and angles at the end of an arm with a pen awkwardly sticking out or clenched....scrawling away some indeciperable hieroglyphic... Mister Google reckons, on average, a Bic biro could write anywhere between 1-3 kilometers of ink and an average pencil drawing a straight line...35 Kilometers. I reckon, without having practiced, I could write and fill one side of an A4 size page before my hand started to ache with this Lamy. Prolly longer with a jazzier red coloured one! :hyper: And if you connected all my cursive writing on that A4 page and stretched it out in a straight line...that would be roughly the equivalent of around fifteen feet of inked length...before I developed a hand ache. Now where was I... Now young blah and school, both Primary and Secondary, were never ever a good combination...like onion/garlic with SWMBO...not good...lets just leave at that shall we. But one of the few things I could do, with minimum effort back then, was learning to write cursive with a nibbed pen. Continuously inked from a small white ceramic inkwell, filled with dark blue ink, nestled in a hole at the top of my wooden school lidded desk. I wrote and blotted away so much excess ink from my excercise book with my sheet of pristine white blotting paper that it changed from white to a dark blue colour...where did you ever get the blue blotting paper from young blah!?...I want some too!...how much co$t dis?!... Cursive writing and I were a great combination...I wrote well...not quite 'My Sharona' Knack for it...not quite a prédilection for it...Latin meaning to "to prefer" "love more"...no...no love lost of found here. More akin to serendipitous...a happy accident of fate...I was a natural. Cursive writing was drawn to me. Well I do have to thank my Primary School Carmelite Order of Nuns for their diligent teaching and snappy persuasion with the many helpful taps from a long wooden ruler on errant writing hand's knuckles. ...to be sure now child that would be God's help in correcting the mistakes of your strange writing I only deliver his help to you...whack, try better child!...and 'woe be tide' anyone...'woe be tide' anyone who blots their ruled excercise paper...snapping of wooden ruler lightly to their palm, menacingly filling the air and attentive young ears. Oh no...not the merciless incoming tide...the incoming tide of woe...the high tide of pain!... Heads bent low, row upon row, the best little life saving nippers ever in action, we dove valiantly under that incoming tide. Soon enough young blah could easily fill pages and pages with a super neat cursive... While most of his classmates, boys and girls, filled page after page with their starry ink blots and crossed out corrections and illegible scrawl resembling apprentice grafitti artists in action...much to the eternal consternation of the nuns. ...whack..now child are ye not able the proper use...whack...of your God given perfect hands and fingers...whack...to pen perfect writing...whack...'woe be tide' child if entry to heaven...whack...is dependant on a further written test...whack...St Peter won't help ye then if he can't read it...whack...try harder child... Now young blah, whether by devious design, plan or just good luck, penned a cursive that was characterised by neat circles and neater joining arms....lots and lots of even circles....rows and rows of them...pages of them. Reminiscent of a row of circular woollen knitting when the knitting needle was pulled out... I crammed my words together neatly, with just the width of a hair's thickness seperating them. It had the odd effect of making my sentences look like the longest word in the English/Welsh language. But it was neat, it had no ink blots or very rarely disfigured with penned corrections. I was soon the class role model for cursive writing...the golden child... I revelled in my new found status... In all honesty and hindsight my running cursive was just as difficult to read as the worst writer in the classroom. My cursive was not read easily...one's eye did not flow along my words like a happily gambolling lamb, bouncing and bounding, from descernible grassy knoll to grassy knoll...oh no... The reading eye struggled, it plodded along to seperate the words, it slowed down, in mid gambol, to make coherent sense...but it was neat...all those beautifully laid out circles...numismatically displayed. The Nun's through gritted teeth praised my cursive....this child(like a loud and highly expressive Dave Allen!)...this child writes like an angel...and will be welcomed in heaven...to help St Peter write and tally up the names of the good... Whack of ruler on desk for emphasis. And then within a year, those educational powers to be, changed the cursive to a more running rounded style...less loopy loops and more clearer word definition... I think it changed to the more easier to read and write American cursive and after that I don't think anyone gave a duck, roasted and/or confit, and by the time we all hit high school we all had our own different styles of write and wrong. That's it entirely! The sole benefit of my education years was the development of a neat cursive writing style. All that time and expense wasted, had I tried harder, I may have ended up a Doctor just like my parents wanted. But in hindsight I reckon my hand writing was too neat...he's not a real Doctor, I can read his hand writing...(bestest Monty Python accent!) And what's your qualifications/experience son for the position of train-driver then...?!? ...well sir I have a beautiful running, just like your trains...cursive writing style...I see.... I reckon in hindsight I am a total outlier and was born about twelve centuries too late. My time should have been the Dark Ages...sequestered away in a monastry up on the top floor somewheres...hidden under a hoddie...writing away by the light of a flickering candle...the letter A on a manuscript('manus' Latin for hand) in beautiful calligraphy for years...taking years to write the capital A...are we there yet?!?...your holding up production...woe-be-tide!... Instead, I am stuck somewheres in the twentieth century, with my new Lamy, I pen grocery lists with a beautifully running cursive script...sometimes in green ink, sometimes mauve...filling a whole A4 page...a whole page for a shopping list! Only to bring them home and then chuck them into the rubbish bin. Occasionally I amuse myself in writing down strange items...buy a gallon of creamy white Mister Whippy ice-cream...a bottle of thirty year old Irish Whiskey...a large box of Tim-Tams from 1975 when/where they were yummy!... And I always take notice and write down what SWMBO wants...don't forget my Sao biscuits... ...or woe be tide!

Fantastic pen. I keep coming back to it as it's light, easy to hold, and a versatile pen for on the move.

I really wanted to like the Lamy Safari, but it didn’t work for me. The triangular grip felt awkward and restrictive, and the plastic body just didn’t feel as nice as I expected for the price. Feels very cheap and plastic. The nib was also inconsistent—sometimes smooth, mostly scratchy. Poor value for money. Buy something else

Long-time favourite amongst fountain pens - reasonably priced, good range of nib sizes and colour options (ink and barrel) and, most importantly of all, a joy to write with.