My writing studio about 8.30am on an Autumn day. Behind my table and chair, the steps to nowhere from when this space was originally the garden of the house on the corner. It must have been an enormous garden, created in the late 1920s.
On Liminal Spaces
A new practice for me, one growing out of writing, creating and land. Iain Sinclair plays a part, Guy Debord I discover has something to say on the matter, and a re-introduction to Will Self and some other characters new to me. All growing out of John Rogers' walks around London. No women, I see. Yet.
Saturday 13 September
I went down a rabbit-hole yesterday starting with Iain Sinclair and psychogeography or perhaps I should go back a few days before that nd Jack Kerouac and Spontaneous Prose.. Just write without restriction or inhibition and tap into those deep layers of ideas, thoughts and creativity tucked away beneath the shopping lists and recipes and how to change a duvet cover. Write without regard to grammar, syntax, spelling or even audience and draw into those deep wells and let them come out.
A great idea, I thought. I'm sitting now in my back garden or rather the liminal land at the back of the houses. There's a shared drive and my house is at one end of it. Each house has a garage and standing room for a car. It wasn't really intended, the cars are meant to be put away neatly behind the up and over doors. But everyone leaves them outside in the weather [and] two houses have taken the garage into the house cresting a bijou dining room in one case and a dumping ground for golf clubs and children's toys in the other. I, of course, have my garage for a workshop kitted with a utility area and work bench. It has a bay window, a nice touch (a visitor asked me once who lived ...
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... [lived] there) which lets in lots of light.
I should have left a page or two for an index at the front of this book because I might write a gem, or more likely an idea I want to come back to. But I can add an index later.
My house is at one end of six and I have the largest standing room outside the house. Large enough to take the car and because I have the benefit of an extra three feet that contain a set of steps to no where, I enough room for a tiny bistro table [and] chair, white, bought in my old house, pre-2000, for the tiny liminal space there outside the back door of the kitchen, between next door's shed.
I was reclaiming the space: the house next door, the corner house, was being redeveloped and, while I was away while my house was developed, they thought it old be a grand idea to create access to one of the flats down my steps to no where and through my garden to the shared drive and egress.
My [curious] neighbour of the time, got in touch with me, sending pictures and ...
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... notes through Whatsapp. The first job I did when I came home was reinstate the reed screening, replace the slab on the top step to no where, and cover them in planters with my little table [and] chair alongside. I had solar dragonflies but they haven't lasted. Oh well.
Across the drive, always under siege from encroaching brambles, is a strip of land on a slope, narrow at the far end and widening to roughly 12 foot at my end. So I have a set of terraces, two on either side of a set of steps in the middle, the feature of the feature. It's bereft at the moment as I gradually clear the space for the winter, revealing the grey weathered fence at the back, the debris of ivy clinging to its upper reaches, and the warm red brick of [the] back of next door's garage. It looks forlorn.
I can hear the traffic from the main road at the front leading straight into the centre of the city and my feet are gradually cooling in the early morning temperature. But here we are at the tiny bistro table and chair covered in old towels from the garage against dew [and] dirt, and here I am, completing my handwriting practice. I like to be neat.
25 minutes to transcribe
I don't know that I will transcribe all the time although 25 minutes doesn't feel too bad for converting it to text that can be copied and pasted for other uses. But maybe I will get bored with it or prefer to spend my time on the writing.
Three pages comes from the ideas of Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way. It's a starting place, I don't tend to be bound by rules too much, in spite of my proclivity for neatness and order.