Fay Weldon

I write often here, in fact the novel before last I wrote almost entirely here, I almost thought I could live here and nobody would notice. It is my office at Brunel University where I teach. It’s a small, square, modern room without much sort of inbuilt resonance shall we say and it has a lot of papers in it which are useful. I … no I like things which remind me of being at home actually, or remind me of the past. So you sort of build put another world in here. 

That’s a photograph taken by a friend, which looks I thought really nice there. And then to sort of cheer things up I sort of bring in birthday cards which I try and change every now and then so it doesn’t get boring. Then people bring me things and I put them in like teapots and cups and idiotic things really which I like. And sort of little things. And there’s a little sculpture of a baby, that’s a little icon which somebody brought back for me from Greece once, but I thought it was lovely, so there it is. And that over there is a painting by a former husband. And I think the first painting he ever did. And up there is a little a little fetish doll given to me by a Professor of English Literature in Connecticut. And a bottle of wine which I keep there for celebration or if somebody gets a prize or gets published or something then you know then that’s always encouraging to have there.

Although memos come round saying sleeping in office is not allowed, this actually would fold down into a bed. So one could actually live here rather, but you might get, I don’t know, get a bit sort of smelly and funny I expect after a bit. But you know it’s, huh it’s it turns into a kind of home against a home. Except I miss my family, my husband and my friends. But you know it’s just an alternative life I’ve managed to, managed to create, which is what writers do all the time anyway, they just create alternative lives.