Posts Tagged "dust"
Writing Workshop: Back Room Ramblings
Welcome back to the Wednesday Writing Workshop link-up! At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to post the link to your workshop posts. But first? Well I guess it’s my turn! I’ve chose prompt #5 (since that was kind of my homework this week anyway… two birds, one stone and all that…)
The following is a description of my back room. Tiny, cluttered, scene of many a thrown sippy cup and forgotten and later trodden-upon rogue Cheerio. It’s funny isn’t it, but when you spend a lot of time somewhere, after a while you just stop looking. Well tonight, I made myself sit, and I looked. I’m not in a very eloquent or witty mood so forgive the ramble…
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I wouldn’t call my back room a dining room. It seems too, well, pretentious, for a room that measures 10ft square and contains more clutter than dining space. The dining table is pushed to one wall with only two chairs free for sitting on, one sporting an attractive graffiti biro scribble on the seat from a certain young Banksy. In fact, for a number of months when Kai was first born we didn’t use the table at all, other than for piling things on that we couldn’t find homes for elsewhere – even now it’s sporting a Nodding Homer Simpson dashboard figure, my pencil case and text books and a pile of Ant’s folded boxer shorts. In our ramshackle two bedroom we have significantly more stuff than space so life becomes one long jigsaw puzzle game of moving stuff from one place to the next into some kind of semblance of order, that actually, no matter how hard we try and when you do get all the pieces vaguely fitting? Still just ends up looking like a small house filled with crap.
Our back room is the room that houses all the things we don’t know where else to put. So we have a dresser filled with stationary and printer cables and washing powder on one wall, Kai’s tricycle parked in front, next to the chalk board easel and the sand pit table and the big bag of plastic multi-coloured balls. (Actually thinking about it, the ‘stuff to space’ ratio has become increasingly weighted towards ‘stuff’ in the last 15 months… fancy that). There is the skateboard Ant was bought as joke for his 30th but that Kai likes to push his toys around on; there is the pushchair folded up under the radiator, next to Kai’s (disinfected) potty currently housing one lone shoe. There is the ironing board and the shredder and the travel cot in it’s bag and svivel chair that we don’t know what to do with but keep in the vague sensibility that it’ll be an extra chair for when next throw a dinner party (we never throw dinner parties).
On the wall above the dining table is our house’s biggest mystery. A square mirror set into the wall, like a window. Why it is there we have never figured out. On my wilder days I like to imagine it holds a whole other world. One with a more capable, together Josie who has a habit of scowling at me. Whatever it’s supposed to be however, Kai loves it – eating his dinner grinning at the plump, sauce covered baby that seems to like sharing his lunch times. The other walls look a little tired, the wallpaper peeling slightly at the seams, and in need of a fresh coat of paint. The line of dust along the skirting boards betrays my cursory and infrequent cleaning habits. The cobwebs in the corners quite embarrassing now I come to notice them…
But the thing that there are most of in my back room? Books. Books upon books, piled on top of books. Books filling three bookshelves and squeezed into the spaces on top and around, or just piled high at the side. It’s mostly non-fiction apart from a small corner, the beautiful floor-to-ceiling shelves in the front room reserved for the fiction section of my library.
You could write a biography of my life by these books. Each marking a time in my life, a specific interest or the latest obsession, most (ashamedly) past-by in favour of the next one before the spines are even creased, apart from the odd one where the well-thumbed pages portray a more lingering interest or significance in my life.
There are the books on alternative medicine, and healing and natural pain relieving techniques, from my days as a sick person. Books on meditation and mindfulness and mysticism from my days of soul searching. Books on mythology and Ancient Britain and esoteric mysteries from my days as a spiritual explorer. And books about creativity and writing and self-expression from my days as writer, artist and free spirit.
I am still all of these things of course, although to a greater and lesser degree than perhaps I once was. The books on healing are looking a little dusty and neglected while the books on creativity are rarely in their place on the shelves, instead lying in hopeful, easily grabbed piles round my living spaces.
I wouldn’t part with a single one. Pieces of me as they are. Pieces of my life, my own story.
Maybe I’ll add to their number one day with one authored by my hand, about a world I have created or a story I have told.
Who knows.
One thing I do know? Sitting here in my little backroom looking hard at every detail it is evident that book writing and wild imaginings should really take a back seat to the far more pressing need for some Mr Sheen and a bit of elbow grease… oh and perhaps a visit from Kim and Aggie.
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So now it’s your turn! What prompt did you choose?
1. You get a day off. Where would you go? What would you do? - Inspired by Metropolitan Mum’s Mummy Needs a Break
2. Write your house rules… your DREAM house rules, that is – Inspired by Potty Mummy’s own House Rules this week.
3. Take a well-loved bedtime story then re-write yourself and/or an episode of your day into the story – Inspired by April’s Tribute to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
4. Tell us about a close-call, a miracle, or a lucky escape - Inspired by the terrifying story of the baby falling under the train this week.
5. Sit in a room of your house you spend a lot of time in. And really LOOK. Notice all the details you usually miss, and describe them with all the creativity you can muster. Let the every-day inspire you – Inspired by ME!
Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here!
If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got today! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.
This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
