A story about death and life in a dismal village not very far from Far Otterby. Starring a labrador. Here's a kind of Foreword.
Foreword
My pen is jammed with coppery ink staining the base. The laptop, which I brought upstairs ten
minutes ago, is gone. My sons jammed the
pen and my husband took the laptop. As I
run the pen under the bathroom tap, spattering the sink and my hand with ink, I
feel suddenly sad and sidelined at this disregard. I don’t feel unimportant because I have a
developed sense of my importance. I
am aggrieved and resentful and I want to criticise my family as high-handedly
as possible. I want to read Virginia
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
again.
I have a room
of my own and a stalwart desk piled with watercolour sketchbooks and oil paints
and brushes. But the desk is jammed
against the window and the chair against the desk because last night my room
accommodated the sofa bed for an overnight guest. The sheets and pillows are gone, though the
duvet still peeps over the sofa back and tumbling files of schoolwork are
stacked under shelves packed with photographs, sports books and children’s
books.
On a small
lamp table is a heap of notebooks, mine this time, with jotted ideas
interspersing the shopping lists and notes on parents’ evenings and school
uniform necessities. Like the files,
they cannot be discarded. In one of them
I have begun a journal, writing with turquoise and purple pens and filling the
margins with stars and doodlings and spirals.
