This was how my study looked yesterday. Today everything in the picture has gone and the room is bare. Tomorrow afternoon it will belong to someone else – and my new study will probably start out by looking much like this image… A strange continuum.
Or the end/beginning of an era. At least that’s how it feels.
It’s an odd sensation leaving the same house you’ve lived in for seventeen – especially when you spent the first twenty years of your life living in seventeen different houses. But that was then and this is now. It’s all about drawing a line and moving on; isn’t that what the cliché says?
People talk about a house move being done in a day: “we’re moving next Wednesday” they might say. But it’s a far longer journey than that. We started packing three weeks ago – and we’ll probably still be unpacking three weeks hence. The whole thing – such a span of time – exposes you to a whole raft of emotions: excitement, doubt, dread etc.; but for my new study I have nothing but anticipation.
That and the self-imposed burden of doing great things within it.
I may have already landed on my next idea. It is modern, topical, and will allow me to explore ‘new’ things, tropes about which I am interested; my voice may remain the same, but the subject matter would be entirely new for me.
As I sit here now, surveying the empty room, September feels seems to offer the promise of a brighter horizon.
Ian Gouge - Writer 