Phase one: data gathering. Three things about your room.
Dust
I’m 0.4 miles from the beach
My room is 13 (size women’s 5 and a half) feet wide and 9 long.
18 paces around, south-facing, a little cold
An irregular square attic room facing north
My room faces West.
South facing 10 paces by 10.
It takes me 8 steps to reach the window. That’s the longest one-way walk to be taken in this room.
My desk faces 108* East.
I’m located 51*54’27” North.
Yes, just now looked it up 🙂
The window is North West facing, letting in some of the afternoon/evening’s setting sun. 🙂
My walls are magnolia yellow.
I have no walls, just windows.
There’s some afternoon light coming from the window, touching the posters on the wall.
I can see a pregnant squirrel on the feeder
Posters from meetings with some of my favourite writers.
I can see an echinoid (fossil sea urchin) a pottery green man and a photograph of Half Dome from Yosemite.
I see blossom on the quince tree in the garden. I planted it after lockdown, as a promise to the future and I worry, more often than I like to admit, about whether it will bear fruit
View stretches to the Eastern sprawl of London
I can’t see the shore from my flat
But I can smell the sea
I can smell the oranges in the bowl. One must be going mouldy.
I can see the bins in front of #7, which Highway Maintenance came to empty yesterday.
I see an overflowing bin, I hear my husband feeding the dog downstairs, I feel the wind rocking the house
I can feel a draft coming through the cracks in the window’s sealing
I hear the rain, my children playing downstairs and the M25 rush hour.
I hear the train horn in the close distance and wonder how long it took for the blare to reach my house.
The din of a tiny fan.
I feel the laminate surface of my desk and it reminds me of the smooth surfaces of the home economics teaching kitchen, where I learned to cook, thirty years ago. It is a comforting nostalgia.
My room smells neutral because I have been sitting in it for too long to remember what it usually smells like.
Phase 2: a different view. Notice what you don’t usually notice. Place yourself elsewhere.
The room I write in is also a spare bedroom. It has a single bed in it, that I rarely look at. When I looked at it for this exercise, it became emblematic of a past life, in which I was single, could write without interruptions, and also of a more recent past-life, before Covid when people came to stay overnight. I caught myself romanticising this past and forgetting that the bed has been used more recently, by my children when they have been unwell and needed to be close by. When that happens, they often sleep, while I sit and write with my back to them, and this image fills me with maternal guilt. Maybe that is why I don’t usually look at, or notice, the bed.
I live in a shared rented house. I kept thinking about how many other students in the past have touched these curtains to open and close them every day. I then thought about how many different people may have slept in my bed but had to stop with that train of thought because I knew what thoughts would be coming next.
I have this paper screen behind me and I started thinking about pattern and disorder. I was reminded of Gaudi’s house of bones in Barcelona.
With my forehead against the window I wondered what people in the high windows opposite can see of me, every day. I thought about being a ghost.
I looked at the piano in the corner of my room, I stopped playing when I was around 16, after getting sent by my parents to learn the piano from the age of 5, I hated it and my piano teacher, Miss Kasmler. My wife plays the piano and uses this spare room to play , the piano belongs to her, seeing the musical sheets and the words Prelude in B Minor, Frederic Chopin filled me with dread, and I realised I ignore this piano, as it represents a horrible chunk of my childhood learning to play an instrument, which I love to hear, but hate to see or touch, now it has invaded my thoughts as its close to the desk in the spare room…
I sat at the door, my back touching it. I heard birds singing and dogs barking outside the window, but also a tram from the street on the other side of the flat. It seems my room represents a clash of nature and technology in the city.
I went and sat in my wardrobe and mostly thought about whether there was a bug on me (I found a bug there once before)
There’s a spiderweb in the corner and I’m really annoyed because I’ve only just cleaned. I inherited arachnophobia from my mother as a child but I chose to reject that. I started imagining a piece of speculative fiction where the spider is my guardian angel.
I lay on the floor looking at the underside of my desk chair. It’s a chair my mum never gave back to her old job. It was signed off by a PT. I wondered if PT missed his chair/even realised it was missing…
This text was assembled from the chat contributions of participants in a Zoom session launching A Journey Around Our Rooms at UEA’s Futures for Creative Writing conference, 21st May 2021