My Desk

Goodbye to a Companion

I can’t remember the first thing I wrote while sat at this desk (not the one in the picture - my desk is way more characterful and significantly more fucked). It would have been in 1993, when I was in my late twenties. The first thing was perhaps a lyric, possibly some marketing materials for the band I was in at the time. Perhaps the most exciting moment the desk and I have had was when sitting at it late in the evening while listening to the Marc Radcliffe Show, hearing Mark Lamarr introduce a record and realising it was the single I had sent into him the week before, ‘Bad Lover Blues’. After playing it, Mark said, “I wish I could tell you more about that. It’s such a great record.” I’ve been played on Radio 1 once in a forty year non career of making music.

My former friend, Sally’s, father owned an antiques shop, and she was excited to inform me that she’d found me a desk for me to write on. It was £100. I was marginally disappointed by its appearance. It was, and still is, pretty knackered looking, an antique of sorts. Oak, I think, three drawers to the left-hand side, three shelves on the right behind a door that is always falling off and a sweeping surface that is beautiful to the touch. It has been a constant companion for thirty-two years.

Sally might not have predicted that I would go onto write fifteen books on it (I have three written that are unpublished). Perhaps Sally would not have predicted that the desk would outlast the relationship I was in at the time, would outlast a subsequent twenty-two-year-long marriage, would last longer than the teaching career I was yet to enter at the point she saw it, would outlast even our friendship. But with the ironic exception of statues of Ramsses II, nothing lasts forever.

Tomorrow, I depart for a different version of life somewhere in the Mediterranean. I will still need a writing surface as that it what I will chiefly specialise in. The desk has lived with me in Stoke Newington, in Hackney, scoffed at my behaviour in Clapton, been comforting in Penge, a workhorse in Catford, an alien in Fenny Stratford and now, finally, it has witnessed the death of our time together in Brighton. It seems too beautiful a thing to throw away, redolent of too much history, but there are things you cannot keep.

Today, I will dismantle it, leave it outside to catch the rain as it waits for some people to take it down the dump. I will put this computer into a suitcase, hoping it survives the journey. For now, I wait for bubble warp to arrive.

This is the very last thing I’ll ever write at the desk. I will buy a new one in foreign climes, something newer, probably more expensive. But it will not be the same. Currently, the intention is that I write a difficult novel called, ‘What Will Become of Us?’, finish the long running book ‘Metacognition for Morons’, write one, possibly two, memoirs which I will self-publish under fake names to protect the guilty.

It is odd having such an intimate, detailed and long-term relationship with an inanimate object, even odder terminating that relationship when it had always promised to be as permanent as God would allow. But all relationships cease and, in order, that I might continue for a while longer, things have to be sundered: a collection of suits, some beautiful lithographs, the hope of seeing my sons, a career and a long and faithful servant.

The desk never had a name, and it is too late now. I had thought it a male, but it occurs to me that I might have been wrong about that.

As a very young child, I had a tortoise called Jomas (so named because I wanted to call him John Thomas but couldn’t pronounce it). Jomas had to hibernate. In the second year he died while hibernating. In that second year before his demise, he was not as good as he had previously been. My parents told me two decades ago that there were two Jomas’s. The first one had died during hibernation as well.

You can get things back. I’ll have another desk soonish. But it will always be Jomas II, no matter what I write in future.

Goodbye old friend.