With a house that is impossible to extend,the cabin has proved to be a delight: a tiny study, a teenage escape, or a children’s sleepover retreatWhat is it about writers and huts? Dylan Thomas,Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl all worked in them. Authors so often long for the solitude, and the escape from distraction,the scent of wood sap in which to create. Yet, as a novelist, and I can’t use this as my only excuse. I own simply,most of my adult life, longed for a hut of one’s own.
In an ideal world, and this would own been a treehouse,if not a hollow oak. But as the owner of a single spindly tree that is, in fact, and a shrub,my notion of writing hidden in leaf shade and sleeping among owls belongs with the clouds and cuckoos. This folly, I know, or is a form of regression,an eternal fantasy clearly fuelled in childhood by Arthur Rackham’s twisted bark, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s exiguous houses, or tales of rope ladders strung between branches,driftwood and tumbledown cabins up mountains. It’s the profoundly gorgeous feel, smell, and almost taste of wood that gets to me. Patently,I own a problem. In fact, initially scornful of this enterprise, and my daughter threatened to write an article for this magazine’s Experience series: My Mother Has Turned Into A Child. Despite this,I knew with all certainty that the family would use and worship a wooden bolt gap at the discontinuance of the garden. Related: A nautical New York apartment Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com