Woohooooo!

I can't beleive it! I wrote "Where I Write" (below) for a competition and it's received a comendation and will appear in Leaf Books writing magazine. It's not a winner but a mention will do me. Sooooooooo chuffed!
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If you want to write you need a writing desk, right?

My desk is coffee stained, filled with stuff (a-la-offspring) that has nothing to do with me or my writing, and is slightly compressed around the edges where I regularly cling to it in desperation, praying for sanity to restore itself just long enough to finish this next paragraph.

It was "donated" to me by a seven-year-old Nicki when she and Jamie first embarked on room-sharing and had to sacrifice one of their respective desks. Hence my desk is from the Argos plywood-in-drag range; beech-effect with pink panels on the drawer fronts.

I write in Hayes’ House, and my desk is the eye of the storm. The storm being five children and a child-like husband. The chaos theory rules here. One of the children can fart at the bottom of the garden and consequently another, who is sat on the toilet, will fall off it.

When Sam enters my writing domain for the eighth time in as many minutes to request that I put the wings back on his dragon, I resist the urge to beat him to death with it and I write about it instead. Surely someone somewhere can relate to this misery?

Writing should not be an exercise in multi-tasking and yet somewhere between cooking a roast, applying plasters to injured knees, and drinking myself into oblivion there is that blissful ten minute window of just me and a blank screen. Here I get to vent, paint my family in a particularly unfavourable light, and feel satisfied that I’ve wreaked my revenge in doing so.

I’d love to say that I write in a haven of serenity where I can hear the birds sing on spring mornings and sunlight streams in through French windows. But in reality I have the living, breathing inspiration of family life, without which my writing would be meaningless. Having said that; whoever said that we should suffer for our art needs a plastic dragon shoving where the proverbial sun doesn’t shine.