Location: Little Venice, Maida Vale
I have a sentimental relationship with Xavier de Maistre’s book. I bought it at some point during a poetry residency I attended in Lumb Bank around 2003. I was a teenaged poet and it was my first time being overseas on my own. In the Yorkshire cottage I first learnt to enjoy red wine. And I wrote some nauseating poems. I read A Journey Around My Room on my way back to my own pastel suffocation in Singapore. I put it like that, but I loved, and still love my childhood bedroom. I remember not much about A Journey Around My Room but a certain indolence, a digressive pleasure borne from a literary confidence which I assumed came naturally to dead Frenchmen.
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This is the view from my laptop. It is what I see every day. My friend Cecilie got me this small plaster dog that peers over my screen. I’ve only put it there for the sake of this photo. If it was there all the time, I’d feel like it was judging me. Gmail sometimes feels like an endless waiting room. I refresh my Gmail with a mixture of dreadful anticipation- I don’t know what I’m expecting- most of the time it’s spam mail, or shopping sites saying We’re sorry to see you go or You left something in your cart. It’s not like I get personal emails these days. And I am not producing enough fiction or fiction quickly enough to anticipate any nice news in that arena. Beyond the plaster dog, you can see the balcony, a lockdown blessing. Some day soon, that phrase will be pleasingly antiquated- “lockdown blessing”. We’ll grow tired of cracking jokes about the past year and try to forget it ever happened. I live by the canal and some nights, most recently two nights ago, there will be a person shouting until they lose their voice. It’s almost always men, just shouting and shouting to themselves until they can’t speak anymore. Half asleep, I can never make out what they are saying or singing.
To the left of the desk are these plants. The spotted begonia is a cutting from my friend in Brighton, and the dolphin succulent to the right of it also came from Brighton. Two beautiful and witchy women who owned a plant shop told me to move to Brighton, the rare plant was a sign, they said. I smiled politely and got the train back to London. The small gray painting with the cat was a gift from a friend. She drew and painted it when she was very young. It’s nice to have a piece of her mysterious childhood in my for-now home.
Sharlene Teo writes fiction and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
Instagram: @strangelikeness