I spent the autumn and winter building a nest, plaiting moss and twigs to my shape. I still can\u2019t believe it stays together when the once-sea winds pelt across the Norfolk flats.<\/p>\n
My study was the first room I finished, two days after moving, just in time for term to kick back in. The painting makes it look bigger than real life. But the things that make us free are always larger in our mind\u2019s eye. Six years freelance, with my job sharing the same psychic space as my bed, but I\u2019ve finally built a border between work and life. That unassuming door makes a hang of a difference \u2013 and just in time. Since I moved in, my whole world\u2019s been on this desk: social life; paralegal, editing and teaching work; research; writing\u2026 I built a border, but that doesn\u2019t mean I can balance it. The pandemic didn\u2019t help, collapsing the geographical telescope. Still, I was lucky it locked me down in here.<\/p>\n
The neighbours (mid-knowing) and the garden (mid-taming), lie beyond the window. The latter is freshly turfed, and the birds don\u2019t know what to do with it. Except for Lady Blackbird, who must be catering for the world\u2019s hungriest chicks as she\u2019s never content with fewer than seven worms and a centipede. I watch her jousting with the dirt when I can\u2019t take the lines of Times New Roman anymore. I don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s Lady Blackbird who walks about on my study\u2019s thin roof when I\u2019m teaching or one of the other neighbourhood creatures \u2014 perhaps a cat or a crow \u2014 but the footsteps always make my students giggle.<\/p>\n
In the corner is a chair handed down from my mum. I planned to read virtuously in it, but its actual use has ended up being cups of tea, knitting, painting, watching the wildlife… The stuff I flit about with when the words get stuck. The desk is plastered with Post-Its designed to stop that happening \u2014 concrete and simple, fear is the mind-killer, convey the maximum with the minimum, just relax and tell the story, don\u2019t tell me the moon is shining \u2014 but how often do bits of writing on paper actually help the production of other bits of writing on paper?<\/p>\n
The plants help more. My fledgling jungle. Every good nest should be lined with something green and growing \u2013 and it helps to have living things nearby in the Zoom society. People comment on them when I log into video chats, particularly the palm tree. In my old room, I used to have a sketch of a six-antlered deer skull in the background, but no one ever made small talk about that. It just hung out, stalking meetings and workshops.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m still getting to know it in here. Autumn revealed a damp problem in the back wall that still isn\u2019t fixed; winter that I needed thermal slippers and an extra heater; spring that the sycamore is a gardening nightmare but a visual blessing. But throughout it\u2019s been sunny, cosy, quiet. There\u2019s a warm, dozy summer ahead, with much gazing out of the big, day-dreaming window. But that doesn\u2019t much matter. Writers are always writing, even when their fingers aren\u2019t on a keyboard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jasmin Kirkbride is a writer doing a PhD on hope in climate fiction at UEA.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent the autumn and winter building a nest, plaiting moss and twigs to my shape. I still can\u2019t believe it stays together when the once-sea winds pelt across the Norfolk flats. My study was the first room I finished, two days after moving, just in time for term to kick back in. The painting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1155,"featured_media":1122,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[642,618,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-norfolk","category-uea","category-uncategorised"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/journey-around-our-rooms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}