Hi there.  I am Gary, otherwise known on the ‘Net as Dapprman (note no ‘e’).  So what can I say about myself.  Well some say I rarely stop talking.  Fortunately that’s in real life and I’m no where nearly as bad as I used to be.  However, this is a blog, and one of my aims is to teach myself to write more as I actually tend to be of too few words when typing or writing.  Go figure.

Hobbies, I have many, though Freemasonry, gastronomy (eating and cooking), photography, and fountain pens are my main ones.  The blog really is just for the latter.  Actually that’s not strictly true.  It originally started on Live Journal as a travel blog.  There were rumours LJ was in trouble and potentially going to close so I copied everything across to here, WordPress.  Getting involved with the London Fountain Pen Club introduced me to a number of local bloggers and after all, how hard can it be …..  So I re-purposed the blog to cover multiple topics (the joy of having to tag lots of old entries) and hope to confuse some people the next time I travel, but pens and related topics will be the main body of work.

My moniker comes from the early days of the Internet, not long after it stopped being ARPAnet, and when JANET was still an entity.  I was at Liverpool University and needed a name to register with a bulletin board (Monochrome) in the halcyon pre world wide web days (actually it existed at CERN, but it was still 6-12 months away from reaching academia).  As an older, barely mature student (having previously studied at The Polytechnic of Wolverhampton),  I was dressing more smartly that my previous rock based attire when a fellow student informed me I was looking very dapper.  It stuck (and even these days I tend to dress some what more smartly/dapper than required).  At the time I was dapperman, but on becoming staff (Food and Drink section) I had to lose a letter, so the E went.  This still occasionally causes confusion on emails.

On Freemasonry.  You might be surprised I’m willing to mention it as I may be accused of all sorts of conspiracy stories.  Well in England there’s a big push to be more open and I’ve always held the view we should be.  Reality is we’re just a charity raising men’s club, which until the creation of the National Lottery, was the largest charitable donating non-governmental organisation in the country.  If you have any sensible questions about the topic, feel free to ask.