My mind is a blank today. I’ve come upstairs to write and I’ve got nothing. I’ve started and stopped five times. It’s funny when that happens, and it doesn’t happen often, but this task I’ve set myself, to post something every day, lays me bare to it. So here we are and I shall describe the room. I’m at what was my father’s desk, now mine. An ancient, cracked leather inlaid into wood, a miniature balustrade of brassy iron criss-crossed around three sides, his lamp a sixties swell of brown, his book prop a cockerel of heavy black iron framed square, two strings with weights attached that would have held the pages open. The drawers have secret drawers within, the scent of him will still drift up when I open them, even though it’s been sixteen years since his death. I’ve hardly touched what’s inside, you know how it is with love and grief, we preserve, we can’t help ourselves, it’s as if perhaps one day he’ll need that stapler. Opposite is the single bed he sometimes used when he didn’t want to sleep with my mother, a dressing room bed, like a suitcase packed, on reserve and ever ready. It sits against a wall of huge, floor to ceiling painted scene, a man with an axe raised to a tree that is barely alive, just branches at the top, the rest bends in extended brown trunk, how has it not yet fallen over. A dog watches him, it sits next to a basket. In the background a stone house, an open door and women and as the wall curves to the left the scene curves with it to a Punch and Judy box on crossed stilts and a child watching. To the right of the tree about to be axed is a river, a bridge, a man with a wheelbarrow, another fishing. I’ve been with this scene so much that my eye accepts every part of it. This, now I look at it all and remember, is my favourite bedroom of all time, partly for that painted wall and this desk, partly because it is split level, and at the steps, stone and the width of the room, a sliding door of pure sixties chequered orange concertinas it in half, or rather a third, to this privacy and cool that my father would have loved before me. It could be 1969, the year he bought this house; from where I sit there’s not a sign of anything more modern except this lap top, the fact that I am tip-tapping away while he would have used a pen and paper; I don’t think he worked out here, his word processor or typewriter, I don’t remember him using them but he wrote letters. The headed paper is still in the drawers too, and his pens. I’m going to take a photograph so that you can see what I see. I’m going to post this for the practice of writing something when I have nothing to say.
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My mentor once said: if you have nothing to say then say that! I can see this room vividly. Beautifully written.
And so from nothing comes something and so it goes on! You still took me/all us readers on a journey and thank you for doing so!!