The workspace.

Right now, my workspace is a sofa and my lap. It’s fantastic. I get to lie back with my feet up, a coke and a banana nearby and I’m hooked up to the internet to give me a constant distraction. It is, without a doubt, the worst possible workspace in the house, but it rocks.

Strangely enough, I also have a study. I am lucky enough to have a two-bedroom castle complete with a grotto, cascading waterfall, butler and an admirable collection of flamingos. Next week I hope to upgrade by getting a helper monkey. So naturally all of the junk goes into the study, including me and the computer. That’s a much better workspace because I am freer from distractions (and from the sofa I can keep an eye on the fridge, which is doubly bad because there’s some left-over pizza in there).

The study is small, and small is good. It means that no one considers putting a sofa in there (oh how I wish there was a sofa in there), which prevents most people from lingering while I’m trying to work. But I have to step over my shoes and the pile of paper, around the laundry and the chest of drawers and around the corner to the door and make sure that I don’t stub my toes again (I have done that and I’m still amazed that I have not broken any toes with my win-for-England kick into the corner of the skirting board). I also have the blinds drawn because I live on the ground floor of my castle with a view of a carpark, and do you know how difficult it is to concentrate when there are flamingos staring in at you? I also face away from the window, so ideally no daylight will ever touch me and I can live happily paler than a Norweigan albino and his vampire mistress.

The downside is that I work in a really small room with no view and only enough electrical sockets to run a computer. There I am with the laundry next to me and I’m typing away, mostly because I don’t need much space but also because I’m not supposed to have much space. Being a writer qualifies you to live and work in something the size of a Skoda.

And you know what? This is actually an upgrade. I used to have just one room to myself, and there were long periods of time when I only left my bedroom to use the bathroom and to bring up dinner, because I was too busy watching TV shows online, writing and sleeping. Spending 20+ hours in the same room is not healthy, which goes to explain why a lot of creative people are quite imbalanced.

But given the option, I’d rather do this than work in some stupid office like Dilbert.