In The Canyons of My Mind

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Spaces within spaces, or, I suppose more correctly, volumes within volumes, in a house, have always held more fascination for me than open-plan living. A house to me should be a cabinet of curiosities writ large, with places to explore and definitely more than one staircase. Which I suppose is what attracted me to our home of twenty-plus years, here at Fairview Heights [just to jog the memory, my rather twee little appellation for our humble abode arises from the name of my great-great aunt Annie's house in Herefordshire, Fairview,  twisted through the irony of John Peel in his nickname for his place: Peel Acres]. I like an edifice with corners. And cupboards. And cubbyholes. I like bookcases full of books, slightly too much over-stuffed furniture and bizarre knick-knacks, souvenirs and collections. I guess at heart I'm a kind of Victorian, mediated by an Abstract Expressionist aesthetic: living amongst a semi-organised clutter of things of occasional interest bound together by words and pictures, music, and technology old and new.

There is very little in which it could be said that I don't take an interest, and creating an environment of interest is core to my being who I am. Sure I love the purity of Japanese aesthetics, minimalist art etc., but I just can't strip away my environment to such a purist, ascetic degree: I need the stimulation of novelty, invention and discovery on a daily basis: to be surprised and amused, startled and absorbed in stuff I neither knew previously nor had encountered before. I leave the pared-down world of the inner self to centre me, inside myself in thought, surrounded by the chaos and clamour of this world. I've realised that it matters not that when I cease, all the thoughts and memories accumulated through however many years of life simply evaporate into dissipated and increasingly entropic energy. The point is the now. And the passing on of whatever knowledge and experience I have by whatever means available to me...

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