I'm in the small
room at the back of the house. I always am when I'm doing this.
When we moved here
it was the 'spare room' although it didn't have a spare bed and it filled up with
crap - it became a sort of Very Big Cupboard, to be honest.
Then the first baby came and it was her room - I painted the walls (badly) and we put up pussycat wallpaper above the old picture rail, and the cot, and then her sister came and it was The Girls Room (a most happy room) until they and their stuff over-spilled it and I got evicted, quite rightly, from the loft and moved in here instead and so it has been - the pink walls still there, grubby now, and the cats still dancing round the frieze above the old picture rail.
Then the first baby came and it was her room - I painted the walls (badly) and we put up pussycat wallpaper above the old picture rail, and the cot, and then her sister came and it was The Girls Room (a most happy room) until they and their stuff over-spilled it and I got evicted, quite rightly, from the loft and moved in here instead and so it has been - the pink walls still there, grubby now, and the cats still dancing round the frieze above the old picture rail.
It doesn’t look
like the sort of ‘home office’ you see in Sunday magazines. Then, my life
doesn't look like the sort of life you see in Sunday magazines.
Does yours?
I’m as cash poor now as I’ve ever been; and cooking chick pea curry tonight with a baked potato was like cooking student food.
Thank you, Colin, for this record - a while ago.
The Twilight Sad - 'The Room (Mogwai remix)' (2010)
you know that's always where i've pictured you. with something like pussycats and the frieze above the old picture rail. i've got a tiny corner next to a lovely warm radiator and a handy shelf for whisky and scissors and scraps of very important things. it's where i always am.
ReplyDeleteand chick pea curry with a baked potato sounds divine heartface
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A handy shelf for whisky and scissors? You got it made x
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I haven't got a room anymore. I used to have a 'den' I guess you would call it, a space for my instruments and computer. Now I sit in the corner of the front room on a laptop.
ReplyDeleteI am too the poorest I've probably been for about 20 years.
Ditto. No money. No den. Ah well.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey and scissors- sounds like the name of a film. Kitchen sink.
ReplyDeleteEver since the 14 stitches in my tongue I've learned to keep the whisky and scissors on different shelves.
ReplyDeleteLiving room floor, lappy sat on a little wooden chair, infinitely late at night. Or work. Or the kitchen table sometimes, early in the morning. Occasionally the library (as in the public library, although I'm more likely to end up with a room known as 'the library' than I am with any kind of den. Officially the cellar is mine to do what I want with although I'd need about twenty grand to do anything. The kids at school spread rumours that I bury children in it.) I both have and don't have money - we have plenty and there is nothing to complain about at all. Personally I have about what I had when I was a teenager doing paper rounds.
ReplyDeleteMy office is about 1 and a half metres wide and just over two and a half metres long and full of junk, it used to be the glory hole when we moved in here.
ReplyDeleteI too am totally skint and L tells me that the family finances are the same. I am not trusted with those, thank god or we would be in a total mess.
Our computer is set up in the dining room at the moment, the "office" being full of old toys and kid's clothes and too bloody cold in there in the winter anyway (small room, lots of windows, no insulation). I do most of my blog writing in a notebook anyway because I kick it old skool.
ReplyDeleteWe're completely potless too. Two kids in daycare/school in America (no state help) plus a mortgage = bye bye wages.
You know, I've never been able to blog from a laptop; can't hack the fiddly little keyboard - need a proper big one, on a desk with a flatscreen set back from it, and a pencil pot just to the right. Plus I have speakers, so can listen to tunes. I can now type (badly, with two fingers) faster than I can write freehand, which is interesting, given my venerable age. Or not.
ReplyDeleteOn Fridays there's always a glass of wine or a pint to the right, too.
ReplyDeleteWhilst fat-finger fart-arsing around cut 'n' pasting 1,000 bits of data on a PC today, I suddenly stopped and said (out loud),
ReplyDelete"Do you know what, I really miss WRITING. You know. With a PEN".
Most of the under 30s in the room thought I'd finally flipped.
I write left-handed, but upside-down. (Stops the ink smudging). Not with my whole body upside down you understand - that would be daft. (A bit like, say, Dancing On The Ceiling is daft).
Anyway, it's big, girly swirly flamboyant, tidy but showy - but not vulgar. (Oh no). I'm often complemented on it. I love to swirl away at a greetings card or an envelope. It's evolved over 45 years or so, it's me and it's just nice, and I'm jolly proud of it.
Penmanship kind of personalises and characterises a person don't ya think? Not in that graphologist way of, 'He's a definate loony axe-murderer, just look at his cursive 'y' loops and brazen ampersand'.
No, I just mean we're fast losing man's artistic beauty of the biro.
And another thing, right. (Oh dear, he's ranting again). I deliberately sit in the 'Quiet Coach' on a train to avoid the inane death-by-cell-phone banalities of the self-important oxygen thieves who clog up our world. And what's the only thing I can hear? Only the clack clackety clack of plastic buttons being pressed overly hard on table-top lap-top feckin computers and PDAs. It's like Chinese Water Torture for the suburban commuter. Tap tap tap. Surbiton. Drip drip drip. Waterloo.
Stave off the inevitable insanity; bring back the chunky pen pushing and pulling - and the smooth, elegant, distinctive, clean, sweeping shapes which were the very living embodiment of our formative years.
Fuck it - where's that whisky?
Blog office for me is the dining room. HiFi cab in one corner, and for company tropical fish in another corner, Turk the leopard gecko (son's) and recently Gladys the hamster too! (the daughter's - who is 23 - so never too old to get a hamster it seems). It hasn't been the same since I upgraded to a laptop though. I was seduced by the portability but now increasingly find myself sat in the lounge in the comfy sofa simultaneously trying to a) talk to Mrs Darce and daughter, b) watch (or try not to watch) the TV and c) do computer stuff. The inevitable result is that I sort of fail to do any of the above properly. I need to reconnect with my den.
ReplyDeleteFeeling flusher nowadays as the mortgage is just about done, and daughter has a job now so can at least fund her own wardrobe :)
Still got son's Masters to fund though - which feels a bit like a mortgage. Stop Press: car broke down on M4 today the transporter back home cost £150, and waiting for the dreaded call from the garage tomorrow. Not feeling flush anymore :(
Doh!
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