Balloons over Budapest with Bomo
Now I'm not lucky enough to have yet visited Budapest, where the boss of Nero's Notes bumped into the terrific Bomo Art workshop, but I like the outcome of that meeting and I will review it in a bit more detail in just a moment. But allow me a brief diversion first...
...because although I have never crossed from Buda to Pest on that famous bridge, I have used its prototype many a time. Weirdly, it spans not the Danube, but the Thames. William Tierney Clarke had to start somewhere, I suppose, and it just turned out to be down the road from where I grew up. On the north side of the Marlow bridge is the house where Mary Shelley finished writing The Modern Prometheus, and the field where the tiny fungus which makes Quorn was discovered - no, it's not a Frankenstein food. On the south side is a weir I've kayaked down and the restaurant where MI6 hosted the secret meeting between the apartheid security service and the ANC, which led to a peaceful transfer of power in South Africa. I've been over it and under it, watched the sun struggle to climb above it on Christmas morning, and mused on the Hungarian inscription on the supporting piers. It's really about time I got around to visiting its larger sibling, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge.
In case I needed any further reminding to get travelling, there it is on the cover of one of the delightful Bomo Art A5 memo books. Yes, yes, I will start saving up for a trip, pronto. It looks like just my kind of place, even if that many balloons in the same sky must be an ATC nightmare. But let's get back to the stationery.
The A5 Bomo Memo set offers a trio of beautifully-crafted notebooks which just get everything right. All three popular rulings are present; one plain, one lined, one dot-grid. The front covers are classy retro, and the addition of textured end-papers adds a touch of luxury too. These books are nicely thick too, with plenty of pages of excellent cream paper; there's enough texture for graphite fans to be happy, but it behaves very well with fountain pens too. I can't imagine I'd have come across these anywhere else, so full marks for finding them - they really are a treat!
