A Room of My Own

A little blue shed at the end of my garden

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" Virginia Woolf

My husband bought me a book for Christmas called ‘Rooms of Their Own - Where Great Writers Write’ by Alex Johnson. I love this book. It sits on the coffee table in our lounge and I often flick through it, closely examining the images of Agatha Christie’s typewriter and Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, the room where she wrote around 1800 poems. She embraced the solitude she found there. Stephen King talks of the importance of the size and position of his desk. He has a surprisingly homely room with rugs, a sofa and a TV and unlike Dickinson encourages his family to share the space. Virginia Woolf famously wrote from a shed in the garden of her home Monks House in East Sussex. She sat in an arm chair with a plank of wood across her knees to write using a dip pen and ink before sitting at her desk to type up the results.

I am fascinated by this glimpse into the writing world of other writers. In the online writing group I am part of, I peer into the squares on the screen to see what is on the walls, and which books line the bookshelves of the others I write with.

Woolf’s writing shed at the bottom of her garden was in fact a two storey lodge set in spacious grounds which she had to stroll across to get to. My writing shed at the bottom of my garden is a little more humble. It is a single wooden room which I can reach in about 15 short steps from the kitchen door.

I am never quite sure what to call it. In reality it is much nicer than a shed. Sometimes I call it a summer house and sometimes my writing room. My husband refers to it as the creative cabin. I like that. Whatever name we call it, this is my room of my own, the place which is completely mine.

This is the room where I work on my paid job on my work from home days and it is where I write and read and dream on the days where I am not beholden to an employer or start and finish times.

Painted a brighter shade of sky blue than we had planned, it has a chalet style sloping roof and a small deck where an orange bistro table and pair of chairs happily sit. On the chairs are cushions purchased from etsy, the fabric a show of pink tea roses. On the table, a vintage green glass bottle usually has a few flowers picked from the garden tucked into it. The overhang of the roof gives a little shade in the heat of summer, and I like to sit here and work when I can’t bear to be inside but the light is too bright to see the screen of my laptop anywhere else. I also like to sit here at the end of the working day with a cup of tea or glass of wine if the occasion calls for it. This is a good place to read or journal despite being in full view of our neighbours on both sides if they happen to choose to look across from their upstairs windows.

My room has doors that open our onto the garden and I fling them wide whenever I can. From my desk I look directly into our kitchen and can watch my husband moving around when he is home, anticipating when he might bring me a morning coffee or afternoon cup of tea.

My desk sits in front of the window. I look out at a dahlia full of promise with bushy stems and rich green leaves which has under delivered again this year producing only a handful of yellow blooms, but it sits happily next to a hydrangea and together they nicely frame my view so it can stay for now. Between them is a stone bird bath. It was here when we moved in and it’s broken saucer top has been stuck back together only partially successfully after a friendly urban fox took a swipe at it knocking it over and breaking it in two. We have a resident robin who likes to bathe here and he is always a welcome guest when he pops by. When he is feeling brave, he hops over the threshold, brazenly standing by the door whilst I am working.

Inside I have painted the slatted wooden walls white to feel fresh and bright and stained each plank of the wooden floor the colour of honey. The room is filled with shelves of books, lots of poetry, books about London and writing and rows of notebooks filled with years worth of scribblings. All books I pluck from the shelf when seeking inspiration or something to browse. I have a dove grey sofa with a collection of vintage style floral cushions, a folded up quilt faded and soft which belonged to my husbands grandmother. A small table with a radio, usually tuned to scala as I can only really write to classical music is a resting place for more books, often ones I’m planning to read soon, and candles, always candles. On the walls are pictures which have been gifts or ones I have bought myself. All of them mean something to me.

My desk is nothing special, it is one I bought from Ikea, but it fits perfectly in the space in front of the window. By nature I am quite tidy and so is my desk mostly. At the end of each day, books are put back into neat piles. A collection of old journals from Choosing Keeping stand side by side at one end supported by books I refer to in my writing life. Tins filled with coloured pencils and pens and a desk lamp are at the other end. I always make sure to have flowers on my desk and their is usually a mug of something hot and a glass of water alongside hand cream and stray lipsticks or lip balms There is always a candle too. Before I begin to write I light it. This signifies the beginning of my writing time.

On the floor beside the desk is a tower of books, many which I have read this year and are yet to find a home on the over stuffed bookcases in my house. On the wall next to my desk is a fabric pin board covered in postcards and photographs and souvenirs saved from trips, tickets and scraps of paper with scribbled words. One of the photographs is a small square polaroid, an image of my Dad kneeling on the sand beside collapsed sandcastles. I sit on one of his knees, my small tanned face with blond hair stares out at me, smiling. My brother sits on his other clasping a yellow plastic spade in his small hand. He looks at this rather than at the camera and I imagine the moment the picture was taken he ran back to his sandcastle. I love this image. I cannot remember this moment, but I remember the feeling.

My little blue shed at the bottom of my garden is a sanctuary, a place to think and read, to create words to procrastinate, to gaze into space and to daydream.

PS: Giving this post a 💙 is a lovely thing to do. It makes me smile, and in ways I don’t understand helps other people find me!