desk

This afternoon I buy a desk minutes before closing time at a Bayswater office furniture showroom. I like to shop local. For 13 years I’ve sat at a bench that comes in Scandinavian flatpacks. It’s really a converted shelving unit. The time comes when a bloke who likes to write needs a desk and not a shelving unit.

My desk is the most important furniture item in my house. I write at a desk. I sit in a comfy chair to read but I can read at a desk. I eat breakfast at my island bench in the kitchen but I can eat breakfast at a desk. I can do all these things in bed, but not nearly so comfortably as at a desk. I can sleep at a desk too.

My first desk as a kid is a strange archaic thing of solid dark wood. A lid folds down to rest on two slide-out supports. Deep shelves behind a glass-panelled door make up the right-hand end of this quaint piece. Even in the late 1950s it’s from another era.

I’ve had countless desks at home over fifty years but none comes to mind. As a school teacher I am given the same bog-standard school cubicle—one narrow shelf for textbooks, four wrought-iron legs—surrounded by 20 or 30 clones.

I work for nine years at a community health service housed in a converted private hospital. I get the space no one wants—the nurses’ station on a corner where passages intersect. It’s a three-sided bench, acres of space, a pin-board for notices, contact lists and business cards behind the main working surface. I dig it.

Every desk before my current bench is a desk to write at with a pen, not a computer. My new desk is a corner desk. The computer will live in the corner, the space to my right will be a writing surface. I will mount two long shelves on red brackets above it to match my red desk chair. I will buy a polystyrene mat to protect the carpet under my swivel chair.

A ‘sling’ under the desk will hold my CPU, the cords and cables coming up from under through two small ports. The ergonomics will be right, the aesthetics perfect. 

Rock on.