Portrait of a Room

The curtains have changed in the past few years, but little else other than the seasonal fluctuations of leaves on trees, blue sky, grey sky, white clouds, no clouds. Welcome to my writing home.

Seven paces wide by six paces deep, walls inky blue. The closed utility room door, scribble of pencil on paper and Oscar Peterson on CD muffle the beeps, hums and whooshes of the washing machine and boiler.

My desk sits under a window filled with the criss-crossing branches and dense green foliage from the thicket of trees in our front garden. It’s only when I open the French doors to let in fresh air that I hear the faint shouts of children floating up from the school playground across the road. Our home is built into the hill, 31 steps from the pavement to the front door and another twelve to the kitchen and family life. Here in this navy walled space though I’m cocooned in my writing world.

I sigh as my ancient black desk chair sinks with my weight and rest my forearms on the desktop, my hands inching forward to open my Mac. They straighten my green notebook and pencil on the way and sweep away biscuit crumbs. I make a mental note to find a damp cloth to wipe the dried brown stains of spilled tea before I find space for another mug in between tubes of handcream, my desk lamp and diary. The windowsill is home to a growing collection of ceramic pots, candles, photos and a lavender scented diffuser. There’s a rough brown earthenware pot filled with red HB pencils and a photo of mum, her clear blue eyes staring down the camera lens, following me as my hand moves the pencil across the page.

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Mum’s presence envelopes me here. The wall behind my desk is home to her unfinished oil painting of a six-year-old me sitting on a stiff upholstered chair, all brown flares and Clothkits jerkin. Black and white photos – mum as a moody young art student in the late 1950s, me playing violin aged around 10.

A framing of Mary Oliver’s ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ sits above a bookshelf holding a magazine file stuffed with drafts of my memoir, the Orders of Service for mum, dad and grandma’s funerals from those four months in 2015 and letters. Sometimes I flick through the bundle of letters dad wrote to mum in the sixties as a lovesick newlywed separated by time zones and business meetings, letters that somehow survived the decades in their flimsy airmail envelopes. And books. Oh the books. Piles of them on writing, on memoir, on being creative. Julia Cameron, Ann Lammott, Maggie Smith, Ann Patchett and more. The female voice dominates here.

And so, I sit looking out the window giving space to the words and thoughts swimming in my head. I swivel in my chair and shuffle the CDs like a deck of cards swapping out Oscar Peterson for Ella Fitzgerald before Bach’s Violin Concerto for two Violins appears and I pick up my pencil and write.

I wrote this for a writing competition at the end of 2024. I didn’t get anywhere, as in I didn’t win, I wasn’t placed second or third but I thoroughly using it as a chance to reflect on what having this space means to me, and what it feels like to sit here.