How many chairs is enough?

Him outdoors makes furniture. Beautiful pieces with proper joints, no botching and no nails. He works slowly, far too slowly to ever make money at it even if he wanted to which he doesn't, but he says that to be slow and meticulous is a relief after a working life of rushing to meet deadlines with hardly ever enough time to fully see a job through. So he's made pieces for family, for friends and just at the moment he's making a dressing table for our daughter, hour after hour spent carefully shaping, cutting, joining, refining, in an attempt to finish it by what's beginning to look suspiciously like a deadline - her wedding in June.

I feel very lucky that Him outdoors has such skill and commitment. But there is a downside. I've discovered that fine furniture makers love to make chairs. Of course chairs are useful, necessary even, but you can have too many of them, particularly if you move from a house with biggish rooms into one with smaller and fewer  rooms.  We did get rid of some chairs, the old IKEA ones that we used to keep in the cellar, but we kept all the ones that Monsieur had made, obviously. You can't give away something somebody has spent months perfecting, can you? (Can you?)


Not only that, the other day when we were talking about what he might make when he'd finished the dressing-table, he mentioned a chair again. 'I like making chairs,' he said.


 It's a kind of obsession, a fetish, this chair business, not confined to my particular beloved, but apparently to many designers and makers, as well as people who study furniture, who write about furniture, its history and culture.

For example, there is a book - you may have seen it - called 1000 Chairs  and another called Fifty Chairs that Changed the World.  Excuse me for asking but how does a chair change the world? Seems a bit OTT to me but maybe I'd better read the book (not). Further to this, M'Lud, when we went on a short break to Vienna, turns out there's a chair museum - I kid you not - which consisted of rows and rows of hundreds, probably thousands of, well, chairs.  He went round it. Guess who didn't? This is a man who once hoped to oversee the fall of capitalism and now spends a considerable amount of his dwindling time examining chairs, many of which once supported the richly trousered and skirted bottoms of the Hapsburg Empire.

All this makes it hard to imagine that he will ever be willing to part with even one of his darlings. But you can have too much of a good thing. We're finding it difficult to move. 

I looked it up as you do - googled obsession with chairs - and sure enough, I found a world of chair fanatics out there: chair theories, chair philosophies, chair psychologies. “Why chairs?” writes David Byrne at Design Taxi  “Well, they have arms and legs and vaguely human scale and shape. They’re people—they hold you, support you, elevate you or humble you. They’re characters with lives and histories, aren’t they?” 

I look at this latest and most beautiful chair R made and do have to acknowledge that it has a presence, it holds out its arms to you, willing you to sit, to be comfortable. I could never let this one go.   

Writing - Not Writing

One of the ways I spend my time here is to come up to this room and write. On many mornings from 9ish to 12ish - not every day but many days  - I sit down at this table in front of the window, open the laptop or note book and . . .

. . . but it's really hard to talk about what I do here. Hard, these days, to think about writing, to face difficult thoughts and feelings about what I do and to share them with you, whoever you are. Far easier to look out of the window and watch the jackdaws arguing in the tree outside.These days this writing business is painful and to be honest, a lot of the time, I'd like to give it up. No more  sitting here alone struggling to make something out of nothing for hardly anybody to read. But then I think, if I didn't do this, who would I be? What else would I do? 



It's not that I'm bad at it. I can write a reasonable sentence, have a good vocabulary etc. etc. And words, stories, ideas, language, books - apart from  people, these are the things I've always loved best. And it's not that I haven't been published - nothing earth-shattering - but I've had quite a few stories and articles in magazines and books. I've won prizes, I taught writing for years and have edited and written books on writing, a second edition coming out next year . . . but still . . . 

It's not that I'm lazy - or that I don't actually write. I write lots - I've got notebooks and computer files stuffed full of stories, novel drafts, small and long articles, notes on writing, on life and the universe. Most of it never sees the light . . . and here I am again making more words - writing this - to myself, to you. It's hard to stop.

I feel like that character in a Samuel Beckett play who says I can't go on. I must go on . . .

In the tree outside the window the jackdaws have gone but there's a little flock of goldfinches flitting around the branches - beautiful busy little birds. See - I can do alliteration too. What more does a writer need?

For the past few months I've been writing this blog about being here in this village - the shock of the move, walking, countryside, weather, the flora and fauna which is all very well. There are only so many times you can write about fungi and sunshine, jackdaws and trees - unless you're a serious nature buff, which I'm not.

So I've decided, for at least some of the time, to write about what is at the centre of my life here - writing and not writing. There's this idea around that 'being creative/ being a writer/artist' is somehow rich and delightful. Quite a few people have often said to me how they'd love to do it themselves if only they didn't have to work at their job, do housework, look after their children. I used to think it myself, years ago, decades ago. But here I am now dreaming of a non-creative life - wishing I could just settle for simpler easier things, like baking a cake, planting a tree, watching the birds coming and going. 

I don't know yet whether this desire to stop is a negative, but temporary phase, a symptom of winter and some difficult family times. On the other hand it could be a healthy recognition of limits, a liberation. Maybe I just need the guts to call it a day and find more productive and pleasurable things to do with my precious and diminishing time.