Somewhere to write

It was so sunny yesterday, and too hot to do anything else, I decided to take my laptop into the garden to work on a rewrite of an emotive chapter in “Scattered Lives” where the decision of the main character changes the plot for everyone else.

I thought that the shade created by the back of the house and the parasol in the middle of the picnic table would provide the perfect setting for inspiration. However, despite the shadow, there was still enough sunlight for the screen on the laptop to appear black, apart from all sorts of little white dots. After going inside to fetch a glasses cleaner (my sunglasses also needing cleaning and this was a further source of visual impairment) and wiping everything, I tried uploading the document. The picnic table was too high up and operating the mouse required an uncomfortable stretch. I put the laptop on my knee and settled for the built-in mouse instead, which I have never learned to operate.

Once I had opened the document I realised I needed my written notes, which I collected. It was then that I realised that there was a breeze, quite a strong one, which under normal circumstances I would have welcomed as delicious, but my papers, firmly secured to each other as they were, by string, began to lift off the table. I wasted time again trying to find a suitable stone paperweight. I got very little writing done that afternoon!

Setting is important and so is a designated writing space, Montaigne’s tower with his favourite quotations on the ceiling joints, Dickens desk (illustrated) and Virginia Woolf’s desire for a ‘Room of One’s Own’ come to mind. I am lucky enough to have a separate dining room with a table, bookshelves and desk, which, apart from doubling up as my study, is only used for meals with guests, and as I am discovering today, is the coolest room in the house when temperatures reach the 30s.