Why "Re-inking the pen"?

The prospect of a 3-month sabbatical is actually quite scary.
On the first day of a friend's sabbatical, I asked his wife how he was, 'Stressed', she said, 'about trying to relax.' I know how he could feel like that. St Peter's has been very gracious in granting me the time, but sometimes I feel a certain weight of expectation - that I'll come back 10 years younger, with boundless energy, improved preaching, great ideas and so on.
So what am I hoping to do?
Well, first of all, have a go at writing a blog. I've no pretensions about my ability to write anything that anyone will ever read, but perhaps one or two folk at church might like to see what I'm up to. Perhaps!
But why call it, 'Re-inking the pen'? Well, I suppose 'Hitting the wrong key' would be the modern equivalent. We're used to spotting when smoeone's made a mistake by hitting the wrong key. But I'm interested in what mistakes were made by the very earliest scribes in the world's most influential manuscripts.
You see, one of my more geeky interests is New Testament textual criticism, and in particular, scribal habits. That is, trying to discover how scribes copied the earliest papyrus manuscripts of the NT: Were they reliable copyists? When and why did they make mistakes? Did they change the text to suit their own ideas? Etc.
My claim to fame is to have discovered that scribes tended to make mistakes when they re-inked their pens. Not a great claim, you might think, but my tutor, Peter Head, did write it up and it was published in New Testament Studies.
Now I'm hoping to take this a bit further and help with the Tyndale House Text and Canon Project, "This is a project encouraging research and education in areas such as the way in which scribes copied the Bible, the origin and history of apocryphal gospels, the reasons for having four Gospels in the New Testament, and many other related questions."
So a major part of my sabbatical will be looking at the use of punctuation in the 2nd & 3rd century NT manuscripts.
And the rest of the time? Helping a charity look at its governance procedures; reading; improving my NT Greek; praying and reflecting on 15 years of church ministry.