My new office is the perfect size, by which I mean perfect for me.
The office I had in our previous home was just that little bit too small. Most of my books had to be housed elsewhere in our home, a fact that was somewhat made up for by my magnificent view of the firth and of the ferry terminal, but it gave the room a feeling of incompleteness, and led to the annoying side-effect of having thirty to forty books piled up either side of my computer at any one time.
For someone who prefers their surroundings to have a semblance of order, this was not ideal. The office I had before that, in Devon, had room for my books, which blanketed the back wall like a layer of secondary insulation, but as a space was even smaller, almost a box room. The office I had in Hastings had the opposite problem – it felt too big. I like rooms that feel like burrows, enclosing and human-sized. The large, high-ceilinged rooms of our previous, Georgian home always felt overwhelming to me, as if I were a guest in them, or simply camped out. I never felt we properly owned that house, or ever could.
There is a rightness to my new office that makes it seem like the room I have been waiting to discover all my writing life. From my desk, which is immediately inside the doorway as you come in, I can see the firth, the ferry – more distant now as it ploughs its way to and from the harbour but still present, still essential, still ours – the Cowal hills beyond. My books fill the wall opposite and half of the wall that abuts it, and there is room for them all. Our bookshelves were made for us by a local carpenter. We had them dismantled so we could bring them with us from our previous home, in the first instance because we could not bear to part with them, though as it turns out the escalating price of timber means we would not have been able to afford to replace them, had we left them behind. Lucky.
My office is a warm mustard-yellow, the colour of gorse. It has crept up on me over the years, that yellow is my favourite colour for rooms. I feel enclosed, protected, energised. Warmed by the sun, through even the bleakest of Scottish winter days.
During the twenty years I spent working in retail, I was always aware that in order to write it was essential for me to have the kind of day-job where I could clock off at the end of my shift and not have to think about the work, at all, when I wasn’t there. This inevitably meant low pay, but the up-side – the essential up-side – was freedom of thought. During these past ten weeks of arranging our move and project-managing the renovation of our new house, it has been brought home to me, with bells on, how correct I had always been in this instinctive assumption. The move was timely and right. Giving the house an overhaul has been a landmark experience, a labour of love. But for the life of the mind it has been crushing, and uniquely stressful. The more or less absolute inability to think about anything else – an experience I have been referring to as ‘brain-wipe’ – has taken its toll on me and on those around me.
Thankfully, this mental burden has been lifted. Just a week after moving in, I find myself back at my desk, picking up not where I left off, exactly, but somewhere close to it. The work feels exciting, re-invigorated, above all, possible. Given the state of the wider world, there have been moments these past months when I have found myself wondering if it was in fact possible, if there was a point to it – the kind of feelings I have been lucky enough, for many, many years, to have entirely escaped.
To have felt them again, even for a day or two, has reminded me of what is at stake, if not for me then for thousands of others, daily, hourly.
While I can, I will. While we can, we must.
Thank you for being here. Reading, writing, thinking – it’s who we are.