It doesn't look very tidy, but from childhood I have loved provisionality in a room, something thrown together, as indeed the bookcase on the right was, in the first days after coming here 10 years ago.
The table I have had since the 80s, when my wife Ali and I carried it from Francis Street market to Little Jerusalem in Dublin, quite a distance. It's the country that doesn't change, but the population comes and goes. The cloths on the printer and the makeshift bookcase are Turkish, from a holiday years ago when I nearly perished from food poisoning. There is an Olivier nomination on the wall, but I am proudest to display a declaration from my daughter for Father's Day. There's a little salt and pepper Shaker couple, from our time in Philadelphia in 2006.
I can just spy a Tibetan prayer stick given by my late mother-in-law Barbara. The curious little pot on the lamp is a Native American item bought in Texas, where we were married. When I work, I am supposed to place a little marble bear and its son in the pot, which also holds pollen, or used to.
The plain inkwell I dug up in the garden, which seemed an apt thing to find. There's stuff in boxes waiting to go off to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas sometime. The chair was sold to Ali years ago in a Dublin shop. The man swore it was "genuine Georgeen" and it may well be.
Out of sight is a wood stove, rather Russian and inspiring, and a very nice armchair we wrestled off a skip. The painting on top of the shelves is one I did as a boy of six in Hampstead, much admired by the Hampstead artists of that time for its naive qualities, but how could it have been otherwise?
The cup was given to my grandfather in the 20s for his painting. His own vanished studio will always be a shadow room for anywhere I work (his stiffened brushes and famished paints are in one of the boxes).
