TWO weeks ago, I mentioned the cubby-hole I was clearing out to make a space for meditating and non-work writing. Of course, I never do either of these activities. But I think a lot about them. I like reading about meditation, in particular, and find this much more interesting than actually practising it.
"Yes," I think as I read, "that all makes sense to me. We must forget our egos and our materialism. I must make time for this. Not today, though. I'm going to the supermarket."
You say: "At the start of this article, you mentioned clearing out you
r cubby-hole. Are you going to tell us about that?" Yes, I am. Thanks for asking. "That's all right. I was only asking because I don't want to read about it. Cheerio." Oh well, cheerio.
The rest of you had better sit tight, as it's going to be a bumpy ride. Come with me as we delve deep into the cubby-hole (if any of you are putting shallow Freudian interpretations on this, by the way, I shall summon a constable).
To get to the cubby-hole, you come up to the first (and top) floor of ma hoose, Semi-Detached Towers, and take a further four steps up from the little landing to a door with a poster on it. The poster says: "Fortress of Solitude." Superman had one of these – a place, I mean, not a poster – only his was a massive structure in the Arctic wilderness, where he went to get his heid together and wonder what it was a' aboo: pretty much the same purposes I plan for mine. It's fair to say, however, that – unlike Superman's – my fortress will not contain an alien zoo.
As you open the door, light floods your face. It comes from a wide window (built into the roof) and, through this, you can see over the little back garden to the trees at the top of my demesne. The back-garden is bounded on three sides (the house forms the fourth) by trees and tall bushes. I could clear or cut some of these to let more light on the flowers, but the birds like flittering in the foliage, and I keep it for them, the ungrateful little sods.
Mercifully, the garden isn't overlooked – that's the good, flip-side of having a moderately busy road at the top. Not overlooked, that is, except by me in my cubby-hole, where I watch the tweeters at the feeder, and enjoy seeing the green haven from above.
You get a heightened sense of how enclosed and deeply bound it is. A magic space, methinks.
If you stand up in the cubby-hole, you bang your heid. It's only 5ft-high. It's only a couple of feet wider, but there's an additional low alcove, with stepladders, an unused single-bed (on its side) and 200-300 LP records. The Burd and I have been extracting junk bit by bit and sticking it in the attic, whose hatch is nearby. One evening, I exhibited distinctly Rabular logic, by suggesting we store the ladders in the attic. "But we use the ladders to get up to the attic," the Burd pointed out. "You would have to get another set of ladders to put the first set of ladders in the attic."
"I see," I said calmly. "Would you leave me for a moment? For I would like to lie down now and dream of having a brain."
In the main part of the cubby-hole, there's a long storage bench, stuffed with newspaper cuttings and paraphernalia. A further two black sacks of this sit on the floor (they'll be slung into the attic as soon as I've confirmed they serve no purpose whatsoever). There's a box of weights, two guitars and two crates of guitary things. A little yellow table displays four Buddhas (randomly acquired over the years, including from the recent controversial trip to Musselburgh; one Buddha is resting with his heid in his hands; another is meditating; another emerges from a block of wood; and the last – "Rab's guitar Buddha" – has his hands over his ears). There's a little meditation cushion on which, one day, I might sit and fill my head with emptiness. We've still to get the desk in, as capitalism so far cannot supply one that fits.
Two randomly found posters adorn the dirty ochre back-wall: one of Middle-Earth and one of the Sergeant Pepper album cover.
The old brown carpet is threadbare, but I don't mind. This isn't a place for luxury. The traffic noise is somehow more annoying up here than down in the garden, but it won't distract me. This will be my special place. Strange and wonderful things will hatch here. Beams of creativity will go forth and stun the world. Either that or I'll just go down the supermarket.
The full article contains 828 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
