A Desk With A View

My previous desk was a cluttered space, invariably littered with note-covered envelopes, dusty bric-a-brac, and mismatched office equipment. It was a proper writer’s desk. The only thing of elegance being the vintage, Anglepoise lamp which sat, camouflaged, beneath scrawl-covered post-it-pads. The table was exactly the correct height for me, and the chair was just so. Comfort is what I’m talking about. This was my private space; where I could write, think, or sleep, depending on my mood.

Sadly, that desk was in Sandyford, while I was trapped in Portlaoise for the first Covid Lockdown. As a result, it became my first covid casualty, sanity my second. Everybody knows that we writers have needs; enough of us have told you so. And at the top of that pyramid, our uppermost requirement, is a space of our own. A sacred place, shared only with our muse or, more often, nagging, writerly doubts.

Some scribes like to work in a shed, some need a library, for the more outgoing, a coffee table at a local café is a prerequisite. All of us have a place where we write, even if it is only a tray, laden down with pens paper and note pads. During that first, eerie lockdown the tiny box room in my mother’s home became my new creative hub.

Boxrooms come with serious limitations, size being the obvious one. In my case there was also the view; not mine, but that of the bored soldiers on sentry duty in Portlaoise prison. My window was in their direct line of vision. This increased everyone’s discomfort. They stared at me while I stared at their concrete watchtower and pondered my next sentence. In moments of distraction, it occurred to me that they probably would have liked something younger and female to watch over. As for me, I wanted something more pastoral by way of distraction. Barring that, my old view of an industrial estate carpark would have been a perfect substitute. It would certainly have been prettier than the watchtower; and a lot of life floats past one’s eyes in a carpark.

Building an extension was out of the question, there would, no doubt, have been objections from my patient mother, not to mention her old-fashioned neighbours and the rule-bound county council.

A comfortable garden shed like the one George Bernard Shaw had – one that could be turned to face the sun as it moved across the heavens – was also out of the question. The builders were in lockdown after all. So, in a fit of desperation, I reached into the closet for a solution to my problem. While many people are anxious to come out of their closets, I had to work very hard to get into mine.

Closets by their nature are dark, musty places which no one enters, except in the worst sort of horror stories. This gloomy, boxroom, hell hole took the horror film cliché very much to heart; with its uninviting interior, its abundance of cobwebs and its collection of damp, dusty, discarded books. Judging by the smell of the place, dust mite orgies were a 24/7 event. If you suffered from allergies, simply opening the closet doors would have landed you in a noisy, overcrowded A&E with respiratory failure. To think that this space was to be my salvation.

After relocating the mouldering inhabitants from their dreary hiding place, and transferring the relentless mite orgies to another closet, I began to convert this most unpromising of spaces into my writer’s desk. Extended hoovering sessions followed by the ‘lick of paint’ led me to a sudden realisation; there is a fantastic advantage to living with a ninety-year-old in their own home. Possessions gathered over a lifetime lurk in every corner. A trawl through the darkest, most cluttered recesses of the house offered up a montage from some of the greatest artists who ever lived. This inspiring gallery now lines the cupboard interior and offers a feast for the eyes as inspiring as anything ever viewed through a glass windowpane.

Finally, I feel at home, sitting with my back to the grim, prison watchtower and staring into my freshly decorated, closet.  Whenever my most inspirational muse disappears on a coffee break, or is suffering from a Monday hangover, I need only look up from my keyboard to draw on six hundred years of creative insight. It seems to me that my closet has developed a view all its own.