My(work)Space

Detritus, debris and discarded cups of tea surround my desk when I enter a period of frenzied writing. Now is such a time. As the nights draw in for winter a similar pattern is repeated. It’s as if the sun and moon conspire to keep us indoors, chained to our PCs, or laptops, until we have completed a productive phase of work. November and December always feel that way. Last weekend I completed an essay on heroic leadership, mountain adventure and Englishness and now I am drawing toward the end of a piece which is a further development of my ideas on the totemic sporting hero. The weight will be lifted by Sunday, with any luck.

At other times, my work space, titled on the door (as is the norm with rooms in our flat) in the French – ‘bureau’ – is an ordered and inspiring retreat from the lures of Sky TV, PS2, artwork, my guitar and Sophie’s piano-playing. The desk looks out to the South Downs; a vista of rooftops, chimneys, and aerials framed with a rolling green backdrop of the hills and topped-off, certainly in the summer, with a spectacular evening dance of colour – from blue, to pink, to purple, to black – as the sun sets.

As is common with academics, My(work)Space contains a personal library. One low-level shelf is full of books covering every topic from political theories of the environment to biographies of Benito Mussolini. My PC desk holds a neatly-arranged collection of politics journals, and is large enough to take an assortment of junk. It is also home to some clippings of my hair – a reminder (I see it as a potential family heir/hairloom) of an accident I had a few years ago with a ball of Bluetac.

Buttressing the desk are two 6ft bookcases to the left of the study which contain our most cherished books. For Sophie it is language guides, dictionaries and the latest offerings on the National Curriculum. For me, it is an expensively-assembled personal library of climbing books. These were rescued from many a charity shop and second-hand bookshops spanning the length and breadth of the country (Durham, Cambridge, Norwich, Windsor, Brighton, and Manchester). They record the romance of adventure and the tragedy of death in equal measure.
Sophie’s desk is situated behind mine and we often work back-to-back. Luckily I have a good set of headphones which are often employed to listen to enervating music (Nirvana, Anthony and the Johnsons, PJ Harvey, Aphex Twin, Sneaker Pimps at the moment) that drowns out her sighs over the latest batch of work from her illiterate and unmotivated pupils. If only they could share our literary haven, I wonder, inspired by the works of Engels, Shakespeare and Bonington, then Sophie’s sighs may be a little quieter.

The room may not be a wooden floorboarded garret, nor is it a Bohemian hovel bejewelled with the finest faux-Moroccanware, but it is a creative refuge from the televisul syringe, nonetheless.