Summer is over, I suppose, but I thought I should show my summer desk. I have to say that, delightful as it sounds to sit in the sun, working away, in reality I spend little time working outdoors.
The chief reason is the wind. In Seaford we have a great deal, so only massively bound books will stay put on the table. The short route to despair is to try to take anything on individual sheets of paper outside. The Mac's screen is more or less invisible in bright sunlight, so computer-based work is ruled out. Nevertheless, how many other offices have passion-flowers?
I have been workless since the end of July, but I hope to be able to tell you of a new office before long.
Here, at last, is Virginia Woolf's desk, behind glass, so I fear the photograph is not the best. I bet that Eamonn McCabe was allowed the other side of the glass. Note the objects on the desk: some files, some pencils, daffodils, a pair of spectacles. Would that my own desk looked like this. I should like to dedicate this afternoon's performance to Sascha Loske.
For more photographs taken at Monk's House this afternoon, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomroper/tags/monkshouseapril2010/. I made friends with the cat.
I promised Sascha Loske I would be at Rodmell to take a photograph of Virginia Woolf's desk the day Monk's House opened for the spring, that is yesterday. So I was, but I turned up to find it doesn't open till 2 pm. I should have known something was wrong: there were no crowds of Woolfians thronging the village and I could park nearby easily. I couldn't stay to wait for 2, so I shall have to return on Wednesday. Until then I offer you the Guardian's description of that famous shed, text by Hermione Lee and illustrated with a photograph by Eamonn McCabe.
A footnote: Hermione Lee writes prose many thousand times more elegant, intelligent and clear than I could ever manage, but don't you think when she writes 'store' she means 'stove'?
Now I have started, I think I probably have to go on till I finish. But I have no photograph of the next desk to play a part in my life, an old and monumental Victorian roll-top. After a bout of pneumonia caused me to miss most of a summer term, and removed me, providentially, from some considerable unpleasantness at school, I moved bedrooms at the age of 13 into a new and larger one sited above my father's waiting room (he was a Cambridge GP), at about the age of 13. Here I had an upright piano, a record player, a gas fire and small leaded windows looking out, in one direction onto Lensfield Road, and in the other onto Tennis Court Road and the back of Addenbrooke's hospital.
The desk stood at the Tennis Court Road end. It had a lock, but I was not trusted with the key, so, to stop it locking by accident I made stoppers of paper which I put in the grooves to prevent it closing fully. It had a patina, and marks of heavy use, ink-stains to which I added and gouges from pen-sharpening and envelope opening. It even had a secret compartment. What could be more agreeable?
As I used it, so it acquired more marks of ownership. I began smoking and kept my cigarettes in the desk, which gave it a strong scent of tobacco. As I was lucky enough to have a school friend who worked in an exotic tobacconist, long closed, I was able to go beyond the usual cigarettes favoured by early seventies schoolboys, No 6, and Embassy Gold, and enjoy such brands as Fribourg and Treyer, Sullivan Powell's Turkish, Sobranie and Passing Clouds. These last were oval and came in a pink box, which would cause a stir behind the bike sheds or the scout hut. It also held, for such were the times, the odd consciousness-expanding substance, though I was scrupulous in removing any traces of these.
The desk was sold when my parents moved after my father retired from full-time practice and no longer needed a house with room for surgery, waiting-room and dispensary. I would have liked to have kept it, but at that stage in my life I had nowhere to put something so large.
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