A biodegradable story

The writer Thomas Fuller writes his books in longhand on yellow legal pads, using a Staedtler pigment liner 0.7 pen manufactured in Germany. The ink's black, so strong that it seeps through to the back side of the yellow sheet he writes on, making it virtually impossible to write on the other side of the sheet.

A dedicated though passive environmentalist, alarmed and unhappy that he's not using both sides of the sheet of paper upon which he writes, Fuller has devised a strategy of compromise: to write on the other side of the sheet in between the lines already written on the side opposite.

I asked Fuller the other day if this strategy was satisfactory. Yes and no, he said. Yes, in that he feels he's using a finite physical resource wisely, and no, since he finds it difficult if not impossible to read what he's written on the side of the sheet previously written upon.

Fuller poses an interesting question: when eating a chicken do you eat the chicken and the chicken skin? Or not eat the chicken skin, as so many recommend, peeling the chicken skin away and depositing it on the compost heap? Fuller says he likes a little chicken skin with his chicken, and is committed to continuing to write on both sides of a sheet of paper for long as he is a writer.

An example of the technique can be seen in the image above, in which the spidery seepages of the words Fuller's written in his notebook appear on the other side as a ghost might, inhabiting an alien world.