Set adrift on memory bliss...

There’s a haven in my house that sometimes I forget about, not going there for years (yes, years) at a time. A place where so many of my thoughts, memories, and dreams reside and yet I turn my back on it and go about things almost as if they never were important.

It's a place that really hasn’t changed for almost twenty years when Gaynor and I decorated and furnished it in a light airy style which is comforting and comfortable - if a bit twee and chintzy and even shabby in that shabby chic way. No leather here, no bold colours or brilliant bright statements – just an overwhelming calm.

I love my special room - The upstairs lounge. In summer it gets the golden light of the evenings, in winter the snowflakes drift gently past its windows in fifty different ways.

I built the display cupboards and the window seat; I laid the white washed flooring and scumbled the cornice, I even re-tiled and renovated the original marble fireplace. It was a labour of love...

Inside are so many precious things. Our collection of a hundred or so china cats, Wedgwood, one-offs, Doulton, and Tai-Wan. The massive conch shells we brought back from the Windward Isles, a huge basket of collected here-and-there pine cones, a woollen Chinese rug, some rescued brought-back houseplants, my sketches of Barbados, glass, and wood, and light, white china elephant plant stands, and memories.

Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes the sound of my own voice, sometimes I just listen to the far away sounds and the close by sounds, the sounds inside my room and the sounds outside my room, setting myself adrift on memory bliss and thinking 'surely one day I will find myself' and watching a paper doll dancing in the air outside the window, the day full of birds, a sky of honey as a man in a bowler hat and suit floats horizontally away.

... Anyway that’s enough. Why write about when I can sit in? I’m off to light the fire and watch the swirling fog outside the windows, after all I used to be friends with reality. But not in this room.

In this room I dream.