My room with no walls.
I write in the ‘spare bedroom’ of a two-bed flat in London. When our daughter was born two and half years ago, she slept in a cot in our bedroom, the spare bedroom was soon to be ‘Alma’s room’. But we have failed to get her to sleep a full night in the room and ignore our own parents’ wisdom to let her cry and scoop her into our bedroom each and every night. So she continues to sleep with us. The room remains the ‘spare bedroom’, despite the sign on the door in bright childlike colours and font. ‘Alma’s room’ in name only.
A testimony to our failed parenting.
A child’s bed, a well-stocked bookcase full of books not meant for children, a piano Alma cannot play, nor can I, and a wardrobe full of my wife’s clothes and some of Alma’s. In the corner, a desk with monitor and printer facing the window. The window faces east and stares into the gardens and backs of late Victorian houses, a train track separates us. During the height of the pandemic, I would watch empty trains roll by and I would find it as terrifying as when I spotted one lone commuter on a train in April 2020 when the world was staying at home.
Although this is the room I write in, study in, sometimes I work in the kitchen on the table amongst my two-year old’s tea set and wife’s classical music magazines and there’s always a children’s book on the kitchen table and one that belongs to the parents; Peppa’s Mermaid Friends – A lift-the-flap book by Lauren Holowaty and ‘Race’ by Toni Morrison lay side by side.
Both the kitchen table and spare/Alma room spaces are for putting fingers to keyboard, pen to paper and pencil to notebooks.
The real churning of critical thinking, the real creativity, the spark, comes from walks, daily walks with my three-year-old dog. A short walk from my flat is a meadow, that although located in a London postcode, once entered, one can believe they are deep in the wilds of the shires.
Here, I can think.
Here I can hear myself and I hurriedly take notes and jot them down when I return to my rooms.
Martin Munroe First-year Creative and Critical Writing PhD student, University of East Anglia.
Twitter: @oolongm