moving day

This will be a long day - I was awake at 3.30 a.m. and got up at 6. I've been mulling my workspace and realized in the middle of the night that I need to change things around. About ten years ago, for various reasons that made sense then, I moved my bedroom from the front of the house to the small cosy space at the back. So the big front room holds all my clothes still, because there's no closet at the back, and also has a long desk and many boxes of research materials. I have tried to work there for years. But it faces east and after the early morning, there's not a lot of light. So I started to work in my bedroom, which faces south and has tons of light, but is small. And then I worked in the kitchen at the back of the house, facing the garden, which is lovely and light but where I can't spread out because it's a much-used public space.

It's been this way for years, me wandering from space to space, keeping my current work materials in boxes in one room or another. For the last few days, at last, it's been bothering me, so the day before yesterday, I swung my bed sideways to have more space in the bedroom to write. But that's not going to work.

I am now waiting for Bill, the quasi-homeless guy who does odd jobs, to come over, to help me transfer furniture and mountains of paper from one end of the second floor to the other. I will go back to sleeping at the front and working at the back.

Is this just another excuse not to actually write? I don't think so, I think this is me finally coming to terms with my needs as a writer. It will be a hell of a lot of work to shift things around, not something to undertake on a whim. But I am pretty sure it's the right thing to do.

An hour later: it's done! Bill, with his long straggly grey hair and toothless smile, is invaluable - and though he looks about 102, he is in fact younger than I am. We hauled file cabinets, a massive desk top, mattress and frame, chest of drawers and four hundreds boxes from one end of the house to the other. Now there's chaos. But I have my office.

Does inspiration lurk just around the corner, in my bright new workspace? Stay tuned. But first, at some point very soon, a nap.