A room of one’s own. That, they say, is the first requisite of every writer. And then you get to hear that it can’t be true because J K Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter in coffee shops. I know it can’t be true because having a room of one’s own isn’t sufficient to prevent the distraction, the lack of focus the ‘must just do’ other things creeping in and stopping one from either writing or just owning up to the fact that the words are not coming out to play today.
I know this because I have a whole house of my own. No-one will complain if I don’t dust, or do laundry, or get the grass cut, or even cook and put food on the table. There is nothing – other than cleaning and laundry and gardening and cooking and lots of other meaningless stuff – to stop me settling down at my desk and scribbling away.
Then I heard about the legendary notion of the shack. The writer’s shed. The hideaway at the bottom of the garden. The rented office without wifi. The place you went to write because writing was what it was intended for. It had limited other functions. It was where you went to work, or to think about working, or to lament about not being able to work. I wanted one.
I had a thought about converting the old workshop, but it was ugly and in completely the wrong place in the garden. I knocked it down and laid a deck. I had another thought about a garden office at the back end but that became the wilder garden, furthest from the house, visible from the kitchen, a place for the weeds to bloom and the birds to visit, a feeding table, a beehouse, water bowls. So the shack got shelved.
But rewind…before stuff happened…life and death and acquiring the bungalow and leaving work and trying to figure out what I really want to do next…before all of that, I had wanted a beach hut. The thing about wooden beach huts, especially if they’re on a storm-exposed north-facing coast, is that they do take quite a bit of maintenance. Then it occurred to me, maybe I could rent a chalet – one of those Victorian / Edwardian brick-built affairs. I put my name down.
And largely forgot about it. I expected a long wait (“years” they’d warned me) and I had a life to be getting on with.
So the call took me by surprise. I must have been the least enthusiastic person the poor woman had to deal with that Friday morning. I couldn’t even picture the stretch of the prom she was talking about – I would have to go and look.
I will admit to being a little disappointed. It wasn’t in either of the blocks that I would have preferred...but I knew before I even left the house to walk to the station to get on the train to the coast that I wouldn’t be saying no. I still wanted my writing shack. I still wanted somewhere I could lock up my gear and go swim in the sea. More than that, I wanted the ability to spend longer days at the beach, which meant the flexibility to do different things over the course of that day – to write, to read, to walk, to take pictures, to laze, to eat, to swim, to explore – without having to lug everything around with me. When you don’t drive there is a limit to what you can carry and often that’s a blessing, but at times it is something that you have to work around. The idea of not having to work around it, that is the appeal.
Nevertheless, I stood on the prom and looked at this somewhat forlorn little terrace and wondered – do I really want to do this? Not ‘can I afford it?’ or ‘is this a sensible idea?’ – yes and probably not – but do I really want to? Will doing this add happiness to my existence? Will it bring me to the coast more often and for longer and is that going to make me a happier person?
Of course there is only one way to find that out, but I think I was throwing the question into the ether to see what response the universe might have for me. I believe you should listen for the whispers and heed what they tell you.
Another slight rewind. I recently read a brilliant book – If Women Rose Rooted – part of which is the retelling of the Celtic folk tales. Being island & coastal folk, a lot of those stories arise from the sea and one of the most famous of them is The Selkie Who Lost Her Skin. I loved Sharon Blackie’s telling and it stayed in my mind.
Perhaps that’s why I picked up The Salt Road in which Joanne Harris turns the story around and has a land-living woman capturing a male Selkie – but the rest of the story follows the tradition of the stolen skin, and the need to return to the sea, and the how the naming of a half-Selkie child in a church of the Folk seals (or steals) its fate forever.
Echoes of the naming and claiming and failing, were already coming out in my own work.
I went for a walk towards the west.
Just at the end of the promenade, I looked seawards and there, hunkered down on the beach was a seal. I would assume that it was a grey seal and am ashamed that I cannot say that for certain. I stopped and watched for quite some time. Concerned at first that it might be injured or net-wrapped, I didn’t want to just walk on. Equally, I didn’t want to wander over and disturb it if it was happy enough and just snoozing.
As I watched, it stretched and yawned, wiped the sleep out of its eyes pointlessly, heaved itself over and snoozed some more. After days of rain and cold, this was a rare pre-Spring day of bright sunshine, surprisingly warm by comparison. I can imagine that a kip on the beach was just the thing.
People were generally unaware. Those who did notice kept a reasonable distance, simply checking as I wanted to that it was ok and then leaving it be. I risked a closer look, staying beyond the groyne and not staying more than a couple of minutes before walking away.
A beach-walk. I have walked this beach for years. I have seen bits of ex-seal washed up. I have never seen a live, happy, seal before. This one did seem quite content. They are curious creatures and so long as we stayed our side of the groyne and merely looked and then when on our way, another stretch, another yawn and back to dozing. But for those few minutes there did seem to be a certain amount of posing for the camera, deliberate cuteness, and an inquisitive look in the eye – a who are you and why are you finding this perfectly normal seal behaviour so fascinating? Not an unreasonable question.
The answer to which is that we are also curious creatures and most of us have never seen it before, not for real, not up close.
When I came back the police had arrived and were steering people away, keeping a people free zone around the animal. According to the local paper the wildlife folk arrived later and the seal was “rescued”. They referred to him as being injured after a scrap with another male. Hmmm. There was no visible blood or wounds, he was not agitated, or breathing hard. The article then talked about minor scratches to his fins. I’d find it hard to believe that there is a seal at sea without minor scratches. I suspect that he wasn’t ‘rescued’ but simply moved to a quieter part of the coast so that the police could stand down – which is fair enough. Can’t help wondering what he made of it all.
As for me…I took his presence as confirmation that this is the right thing to be doing. I found a bin for the rubbish I’d picked up on my walk (plastic sheeting, nylon netting of the kind you used to buy marbles in, maybe still do)…and went home to ponder setting up my shack.
