THESE PRECIOUS SPACES.
This desk and all these books, lovingly placed, lovingly made, everything perfect right down to the musty smell of the paper saturating the room. I say I would like to write here, sat in what seems like an almost comfortable chair with views through the window to the Clyde at the bottom of the hill.
These bookcases and chairs, with their beautiful designs. I can imagine an afternoon with only the ticking of a clock. I say I could write here too or read poetry and works of beauty, maybe breaking off for cocktails in the evening with the murmur of cultured voices.
I say I could but I doubt I would. Defying all the laws of ergonomics my favourite place to write is on my bed at the top of the house, where the clothes are strewn over the floor and Alexa sometimes does and sometimes does not work. I worry the backboard of the bed will break, I worry the clutter will distract me but often I just waft away into the clatter of my key board. I type too harshly and loudly but somehow over the years I find I also type without asking where my fingers will go. Tell me to point to where the letters are and I would not have a clue, get me to type and it just arrives preformed. I like that, it connects me to the words more tightly and to whatever is going on in my brain. I like that if there is music playing or someone speaking they fade away until I cannot hear them anymore unless I make a conscious effort to pause a little and drift back into reality.
Sometimes the sound of the birds breaks my rhythm or a crow stalks across the roof, visible through the velux window and then I am delighted. Sometimes but less often, I hear horses in the street clip clopping or the sound of the family and light up a little at the distraction. More often though I write when the children are at their dad’s or when their mum is out dancing with her mum in Dumbarton and the house is empty save for me and Dash the dog curled up at the bottom of my bed near where my feet are tangled in the downie.
The settings where I have written? Yes, my house and when I have been lucky enough to take time away it has usually been places in the Highlands. The youth hostel in Achmelvich where our informal writing group used to meet for a few days each winter when it was closed to the public. I always splashed out and booked a single room. I would start early, using my bed as my chair and a folding table as my desk and Wow! the freedom to have hour after hour free to write. It is only now that I wonder if it was really the freedom to write or the freedom to be me on my own. Some days the gales would be so noisy and harsh that the there was a rage to the wind and a violence to the rain and a damp brittleness to the air and I would thrill to this. Other times the sun would shine and I would take a break to walk by the beach or up towards the hills.
In the evenings I was usually silent with my companions who had no need of my conversation to add to the atmosphere. In lieu of words I would cook tea or do the washing up and then sit in my seat drinking whisky, listening to everyone. Towards the end of our times there I did find myself speaking. I am very grateful when I gain the confidence to speak and even more so when I can tell that people want to hear me. More often than not I doubt the value of what I say and just listen.
Achmelvich was great and so was Blackhill, where I did a lot of work on my last memoir. I had the use of an Air B&B all to myself. My favourite room was the bedroom at the top of the house where the ceiling was made from the V of the roof with the bed backed onto a small window on the narrow outside wall. I would look out at the fields and the trees and the silver of the Cromarty firth with the oil rigs and other ocean installations getting mended or refurbished.
It has a huge landing outside the bedroom, again it has a desk and a chair which I wanted to sit and write at as they seemed so, so, writerly! but again I tended to stick to the bed or the sofa downstairs in the tiny sitting room. In the morning I would take Dash down to the shore at Evanton where the old fishing station was, or I would take him to the Black Rock Gorge which made me dizzy looking at it. Sometimes I would go next door and eat cake with Cynthia or Peter and the Grandchildren but often I would sit alone with the dog and drink my whisky as the night made the window panes all black and shiny.
By subterfuge once, I spent two days at Cove Arts Centre, working on some crucial sections of my first memoir; START. They had advertised a weekend for the local community but when I joined the class I became tongue tied and perhaps less interested in the exercises than I should have been. In the end I retreated to the converted shipping container and wrote, looking out at the small lochan at the end of its decking. I loved it but failed abysmally to socialise in the evenings with all the other artists. Their vocabulary and understanding was so different to mine. I failed to even understand or get the slightest glimpse or sense of belonging to the culture that they represented. These young artists tried to include me on occasion but my words stuck in my throat and I found my heart sulking. It was a relief to return to my cabin and my bed and my lap top and the writing that does not have standards of conduct and behaviour attached to it.
Once, when I was richer, I went to a lodge at Lochinver, there we had meals prepared for us and walked over the moors talking about the vegetation and history and the clearances. There; companions swam in the loch and there all of us found far too many leeches, ticks, midges and clegs for our liking. But I loved it, those times trying to work out what is my story I have every right to write and what is someone else’s story I have no rights over and what to do about the intersection of the two and that intensity – suddenly stopping after three hours of typing, dizzy headed, needing to walk out into the fresh air to the heather and the sights of the peaks in the distance.
I have written at work and I have written for many days at Moniack Mhor. That is another story because it was work writing and yet assisted writing. A potent place where people I care deeply for found a voice they sometimes did not know that they had any right to; a place of laughter and tears and shared meals. A place to perform and drink too much and have our fragile senses of expression and self, supported and enhanced by writers even we had heard of. A place where women who had not dared to sleep in the same building as men did so in safety and a place where people who would not eat in company dared to but also a place where people had drunken epiphanies and fell asleep in cupboards or set their poems on fire in protest at their unheard voice and tried to walk home in the midst of a blizzard. A place of liberation and release and joy. A place where we found more of our voice and our talents than we knew we had.
And lastly I write at writing groups, I wrote at the groups I facilitated in the Highlands and found I could hardly bring myself to call the joy of it work and I write at Jeans Bothy writing group. Somehow I lose myself for a brief twenty minutes and catch sight of things I did not know I wanted to say. Today I wrote in the café at Hillhouse with the writing group and now it is late for me and as usual I am in bed. The light glows besides me.
When I took Dash out for his wee earlier the bats were flittering around my face and I was delighted. To make that delight real, to describe them under the trees in the gloaming; jinking, a sudden glimpse of wings and then nothing; almost the wind of them as they dart close to my face. I would love the time, the space, the room to make that last sentence real so you could really see my joy at sharing this street with these silent, strange creatures. In my writing spaces I have small glimpses of the chance to do that.
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