“Go to your room!”
How many of us dreaded those words as children? To a young person with more energy than a nuclear reactor, all the time of youth to fill and a wide world to explore, that one phrase would chime as sombrely as a death knell, killing all fun and slamming the day closed in the process, becoming a paradox of all those simple, literal meanings that room carries for a child: room to breathe, room to manoeuvre, breathing room and so on.
Years pass and sensibilities change. Whereas before, all that was needed was room for the body to roam, I find that as I grow older I become more of a home bird, straying less and less, wanting more license for the mind to roam too. So, with this in mind, I gave myself up completely to that earlier paradox and looked to put together ‘a room of one’s own’ to facilitate this.
Many of the rooms in the house I love for various reasons, whether it be their décor or simply their feel; in summer even our small garden acts as an outdoor room: cosy, filled with green life and views of the hills beyond that would grace any picture window. But the space I love most of all of them is the smallest in the entire house – my study. My room.
I’ve written all over the house: poems in the garden, stories at the dining table and, even once, a short reflection on angling in the shed, but none of them have ever been as productive as my little study.
To begin with, the colour is green, from the deep forest green of the curtains and cushions, redolent of every woodland walk I’ve ever taken, to the lighter, subtler green of summer seas. The desk, a solid, purposeful slab of dark wood, dominates one half of the room, giving me the space to write and spread my trinkets, all those votive objects that must be just-so – the pens, the small gold desk lamp (with green lampshade, of course), the scented candle – for the words to flow.
Words breed words, and so I am surrounded by them whenever I sit in my chair – a few thousand of my own, a few millions of others’. Books of all shapes and sizes line the wall above the desk and fill the shelves behind the chair, their constant ever-presence cocooning me with their comfortable colours and tatty, dog-eared usefulness that take on a talismanic existence when the pen stills awhile and they’re lifted from their place to fill those quiet moments and kick-start thought and action once again.
From the bookshelves, the eye wanders across the collection of all those things that make this room mine, a part of me and a collection of my parts in turn. Occupying a small corner on the lowest wall shelf is a small wooden centre pin reel given to me by my grandfather; atop the standing shelves a small, framed picture painted for me by my artistic daughter, and across spaces on the walls above the door and next to the desk, shoals of fish swim their way across mounted colour book prints and cigarette cards as they flit and splash their way into my daydreams of the next session on the bank or the beach.
Unlike some instant DIY catalogue assemblage of furniture and décor, time has been given free rein to design this room, the objects slowly assembling like flotsam gathering at the edge of a pond – here, a candle from a fragrance shop browsed whilst on holiday, there a bric-a-brac shop ornament gathering dust next to a fishing mug stumbled across in a charity shop, now filled with steaming hazelnut-flavoured coffee.
Assembled in this way, my room now gives context to every idea spawned between its walls, each word scribbled down on the leather desktop pad. From the spring light crashing through the window to the cadence of rain on the glass concealed behind drawn curtains steeping in a pool of shadow beyond the little lamp’s reach, everything I write is given form by its lines and its endless metaphors.
Even at the end of the most dissonant of days, I can sit here in this chair, the leather creaking with each move I make, bend to my notepad and start to chip away at the words one-by-one, those scattered fragments and partial thoughts that begin to gather their own pace and fit together, chiming until it seems the evening, my thoughts, and even life itself, all begin to rhyme again.
