Since I’m spending the vast majority of the time these days sitting at my desk, and since there’s no travel on the horizon for me at all – or any of us – I thought I’d give you a tour of my workspace.
I have two jobs, both desk-based, at both of which I’m able to work from home but as of four minutes time, I’m furloughed from one of them for lack of money which gives me more time for blogging and writing. Which will also occur from this desk. I’m not going to do a room tour. Basically, there’s a built-in wardrobe full of junk in the opposite corner and all the other walls are filled with bookcases, although there’s a tall chest of drawers with a big TV on top to my left. Then there’s stuff scattered around, which is why you don’t get to see it. You don’t want to see a carved wooden elephant table covered in my rock collection, two washbaskets, an adorable mini chair with blankets on it, a pull-out desk containing a crate of Guiding and crafting junk, a homeless whiteboard, a violin and the mini table next to my desk which is currently holding a hairbrush, the remote for the Now TV box, a tenor recorder, a box of cereal and a pile of Malory Towers books.
No, this is desk only. And this is my desk:
It’s an Ikea job. At one end is the Kallax, which operates as both storage and desk extension and at the other end is an Alex drawer unit, which I only have because legs weren’t available during the work-from-home rush of desk-buying. It’s nice to have extra storage although at the moment I’m not doing much with it.
I’m used to two large screens on arms at work so within two hours of working from home on my laptop, I’d ordered a second screen. They’re smaller than I’m used to – things just don’t fit in the same way but they do the job and the big screens would drown this desk. Actually, my second screen is a small TV and because it’s not positionable, I’ve taken the little felt pads that should go under the Kallax and used them to tilt my screen up and back slightly.
Then we’ve got the contents of the Kallax. It’s the things you want on the desk but I don’t really have space for, so this is a really useful extension. In my nearest cube I’ve got two pen pots, which are Christmas market mugs from Frankfurt 2015 and Innsbruck 2018. A few plane-shaped paperclips live in a little bowl I made in my first and last attempt at using a real pottery wheel on a leaving do two years ago. There’s also my scrap paper notepad, my metal scrapbook ruler and hiding down the back, my stapler and hole punch, although I don’t really need either when there’s no paper involved in my job.
The books are my Teach Yourself Norwegian course book, my Iceland guidebook and the little red book turned the wrong way round is the first draft of The Iceland Book – I’m too lazy, even in lockdown with nothing better to do, to leave it the right way round and edit my real name out. The little stone polar bear acts as a bookend but also as a paperweight, mostly for holding the guidebook open while I’m referring to it.
In the second cube there’s a USB hub clamped to the shelf with wires for my lamp, a micro-USB that’s for my charger block or camera or tablet, and a Lightning cable for my iPhone. I’ve managed to poke most of the wire down the gap, because it’s a pretty long wire. Then my camera and Gorillapod live down the back, with a jar of boiled sweets, a tube of moisturiser and my purse, although I can’t see it from the chair and will forget it’s there by the time I’m out of lockdown. Lastly, there’s a glass coaster with Hekla on it and a toy polar bear that fulfils much the same purpose as the stone one. Its baby is underneath my screen and then there’s a small stone polar bear sitting on the screen’s stand.
At the top of the Kallax, there are two card-and-fabric boxes. The one on the right contains a drum machine I bought when I was a teenager and my white photo blanket. The one on the left contains all the red and gold bits and pieces for my Russia scrapbook, letters and stickers and embellishments and cards and so on. Speaking of which…
The scrapbook itself lives in the lower-level cubes, right by my knee. There’s also my Senior Section Spectacular centenary scrapbook from 2016, because one section is about completing a badge, which I have one more section to finish off. Opposite is my 2003 Russia scrapbook, a few packets of photos, the evidence file for my Young Leader at Brownies and some glues.
In the other open cube is my SRT kit – you’ll meet that in the next post – and my caving rope. Underneath are two more of those boxes. The one on the left contains all the jumpers that used to be in two boxes under the bed that used to be here. The one on the right contains my old stereo/CD player, my mini accordion (no, I can’t play it), a plastic recorder-style piccolo (nope) and five recorders in three sizes (yes, I can play them all. The treble – the middle size – is my favourite)
On top of the Kallax is a bit more stuff. The printer is one I inherited when my boss decided that forcing it to reconnect to his wifi was harder than just buying a new one (nothing wrong with it other than that it’s now a few years old). The folders will be going back to work when I do and the dinosaur is just guarding everything. I’ve had that dinosaur since I was five years old. A couple of years ago it suffered a broken tail when my sister knocked it down the stairs but it’s not in bad condition for thirty. Above it all is a pinboard. It’s got my latest glasses prescription, a copy of the original registration certificate from 1976 for my Ranger unit, the district’s minibus permit and some cards and leaflets and bits I don’t want to lose.
Let’s go to the other end of the desk.
There’s not so much here. There’s my diary, open at the page with the outlines for The Iceland Book. I suppose it’s somewhere between diary, journal and bullet journal but I just call it my diary. The lamp is actually battery-powered. I leave it plugged in but if I want to, for example, light my recorder box a bit better, I can unplug it and bring it over. It has three brightness settings and five colour settings, ranging from pure blueish white to a quite reddish white via shades of yellowish. There’s the other of the pair of glass Katla coasters, with an empty glass on it. There’s an Echo Dot – mostly she plays music from my phone and tells me when to go to lunch and when to finish work but I like having her there to help me out.
And then there’s this little monster. A few years ago I successfully made seven little clay dragons, give or take that the first one’s head drooped during baking because I didn’t realise I had to support it. So I branched out, bought some effects Fimo in grey stone and made a gargoyle. I’m reasonably pleased with it, give or take that when I moved it from the shelf to the desk I had to re-glue a wing and an arm, neither of which feels stable even now, and then broke a horn off and had to reglue it too. It’s neither a work of art nor a technical masterpiece but I quite like having it perched on the desk glaring at me.
These two were my Christmas project. A friend of mine makes needle felted things semi-professionally and I’d never tried it so I bought a kit and made two elephants. The thing is, the bigger one is supposed to be the calf. Something went wrong in the making and it accidentally became enormous. To be honest, I may have enough wool left to make a third elephant and lockdown is a good time to find out. These two lived on the mantelpiece until the desk arrived and now they sit between my two screens.
And lastly, the contents of my desk drawers. I don’t know what I’m going to keep in there permanently. The top one contains bits and pieces that don’t have other homes: a packet of coloured ink cartridges for when I find my cartridge pen again; the allen keys used to put all this together, a pack of mini pegs and hooks for hanging pictures up on my mini gallery; USB sticks shaped like a badger and a submarine; a set of removable sticky note tabs/flags and my noise-cancelling headphones that I don’t at all need at home. The second one contains a microphone I found under the bed, some payslips and a pack of Instax photos from my camping trip to Paris in 2017. The third drawer contains stuff I had out on the table but threw in there for tidiness: the latest issue of Guiding magazine that arrived at some point in the last week and its Adventure Made Easy supplement and my DofE scrapbook which I used for a post you’ll see in two or three weeks. The fourth drawer currently contains a page from my Russia scrapbook. I sprayed it with spray glue and stuck down some gold leaf decorations. The trouble is that it’s still too sticky to return to the book so I need to figure out how to fix that. The last drawer is still empty.
And last of all, the pictures on my windowsill. They’ve spent a few years hovering around, sitting on bookshelves, being in the way, but now I can see pictures on my neighbours’ windowsills, I’ve decided to home them there. From left to right: silver wooden frame with spider webs in the corners, me with my caving club after a long cave-less hike; aliens frame, four friends on the Year 12 French study trip eating waffles at the Trocadero in Paris; blue acrylic frame with chipped gold crown on top, my two best friends at one of their weddings, the other two of us are bridesmaids; original Disney card frame/mount, me and the bride when we were fourteen, on Big Thunder Mountain at Disneyland during the Year 10 French exchange. Plus three battery-powered candles because we don’t do real fire in this house.
And that’s it. That’s my desk, my workspace and the place where I spend most of my waking hours these days.