I sat at my dining room table. A table dominated by gaping holes and crevices where the wood had worked in its past life. Spaces where nine inch nails had slowly been screwed in to hold the feet of the railway lines. The crevices yawned where the wood had aged itself away, broken down into dust and whipped up by the wind to restart the cycle. I love the simple boyish fact that I could drop a knife through my table or when I read a book my fingers crawled across its surface and picked at the curved holes.This was purposeful, I asked the carpenter to plane off only a sliver from the planks surfaces. Only because I was a tactile person and I wanted the imperfections of each plank to buttress each other at every joi. I wanted my eyes to run along its surface bouncing between the hues of red and black. During the occasional bounce my eyes would bump into a crumb trapped in a crack begging to be rescued. My boyish endeavour would send me off to craft or find a tool to rescue the abandoned morsel. It hardly ever took longer than a minute to free one but the smile lingered on the corners of my mouth for a full five, it made me wonder, did the person who left the morsels do it for my pleasure? Towards the end of the rescue mission the speck would be flung from the darkness of the crack and onto the light of the table top, and for the final act I would inhale, and with gusto, I exhale and lose the crumb forever.
This table is my sanctuary. Somewhere to retreat from the monotony of today or yesterday, it allowed me to envision tomorrow. Sitting down on the un-cushioned bench seats I can free my mind. The benches were plain, a simple design from page two of the ‘how to carpent’ book. Yet to the eye they were complex, each one topped with a two inch thick slab of rhodesian teak, their heft would make anyone’s arms and back break into song. A craggy bench-scape hard on the ass. A myriad of external canyons snaking across the wood made for a splintered frame of the tiled floor below it. The spaces between the wood did not welcome my ass but they bit and chewed on it as I sat, when I stood I left with a map of the gnarly bench waving good-bye to its negative image. My simple comfort.
Breaking my eyes off a crack that was determined to meet its neighbouring crack to look at the table cloth I smiled. Traditionalists insist on a tapestry woven from natural or synthetic fibres as table clothes whereas modernists rely on two-dimensional transparent extrusions. I was in the camp of traditionalists, the natural tapestry was my choice, millions of fibres bleached and woven together. Unlike the traditional traditionalist, I had a collection of tapestries covering my table. Some of them were thick and hefty containing monochromatic dyed prints and some were plain. Each book had a vague to no reason for sitting on my table, the jumbled tablecloth of books occasionally reminded me how much reading I had to get through. Occasionally they pinged me with guilt, about the number of unused notepads, Winston you can start a school. But it never bothered me for long because this was my dreamscape, I loved the multi-storey piles of random unrelated books precariously hanging over gaps in the table. I loved the sense of trepidation when my eyes settled on a 1500 page dictionary perched next to the 1000 pages of Tolkein that itself was challenging a collection of Bertrand’s letters as to who is the tallest.
The table was not simply a literary haven with books and pens, it was a dreamscape. Lost between the volumes were 2 tea candles floating between unrelated tales. I had brought them to the table during a power cut with the well-meant of ambition of providing myself light but oddly never got round to lighting them. They were scented, and scent in its intangibility has the power to make you feel like there is a company when you in the room alone.