The Minutiae of Writing - 2. The Desk

My old desk is in Leicester, at my wife's father's house, a big place with a big room where a lot of our stuff has been stored for (gulp) over five years now. He's a nice man, that David Carrier. Patience of a saint. Or maybe he just forgot about the room and we can keep our stuff there for another five years...

Anyway, this desk is a bit of a tank. It wouldn't fit through the door of my study. So I got a new one. From IKEA. I bought some legs that double up as shelves and a big piece of frosted glass to go on top. It looks nice and it's good to work on, even if I still have visions of crashing through the middle of it during a period of key pounding. On top of the desk I have the following:

• Two Apple Macintosh laptops (one battered old iBook, one nice new MacBook)
  
• One plastic storage cube with four drawers for my little bits of junk (dice, marbles, lip balm, pebbles, chocolate, lens filters, Post It blocks, notebooks, photographs, glue, badges, tins, plectrums, batteries...)
• Speakers for the laptops
• A halogen lamp
• A pair of headphones
• A graphite sketch set
• A cutting mat
• A white mug with an apple core in it
• Two organisers filled with stolen stationery from boutique hotels
• A cricket ball
• A wooden box filled with ink cartridges and dried rose petals
• A wooden pen pot bought in Seoul
• A stone bowl containing coins, MiniDiscs and a phone charger
• A stack of CDs
• A bigger stack of notebooks

I like a big desk. I'd love to have two desks and me sandwiched between them. You can't have too much desk space, I say.