I mostly write with fountain pens, primarily pre-1980s, but find myself rather confused by much of this article. Presumably there are terminology differences involved, but I have no idea what he is referring to by 'socket', why it needs to be washed <i>weekly</i>, or why he would <i>add</i> one to a pen. I can't find anything online, and the various uses of the word in the article don't really fit any part of a fountain pen that I do know about. I don't understand how a <i>nib</i> would be curved to fit a smaller hand: the 1930s Waterman reference he makes might be a reference to the Lady Patricia, but that's a smaller-bodied version of the at-the-time quite large Patrician; I don't think the nib, or even the size, is particularly different than Watermans before it. I'm also not sure I'd agree about modern pen mechanisms being more complex: while the article is inconsistent about when the shop was opened (77 years ago, but also late 1950s), that would have put the shop during his grandfather's time right around an era of pens like the Sheaffer Snorkel (filled through an extending snorkel by a pneumatic mechanism to avoid the nib, itself with an unusual cylindrical design, needing to be immersed in ink) that are particularly complex compared to modern fountain pens, which mostly seem to use typical, stiff nib and feed designs, and cartridges or converters rather than elaborate filling mechanisms.<p>I certainly don't 'wash off' a pen with water once a week when I'm using it, and I'm not even sure what that would mean. Unless there's a problem with ink flow, there should not be 'excess ink'. Is he saying the pen should be flushed once a week? That seems quite excessive. It's just very odd that he seems quite insistent about the necessity of something that I've never heard of.