"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

10 October 2018

Handy.


Philip Pullman on the importance of desk height, watching birds, and Myriorama cards ...

I get to my desk (in a very small room at the top of the house) at about 10, and fiddle about with the height of the desk and the chair until I’m comfortable. I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at, and sometimes a bit lower to type.

The desk is covered by an ancient kilim, because it looks nice, but that’s not a good surface to write on, so I have one of those green safety cutting mats to support the paper I use, which is A4 narrow lined, with two holes. I love the shape of the A paper sizes. It’s the only one of Andrea Palladio’s recommended architectural shapes (the ratios of room length to width, and so on) that contains an irrational number, in this case the ratio of one to the square root of two. Very handy for illustrating Pythagoras’s famous theorem, in fact.

Nearby is a basket full of coloured pencils, including some of the best of all, the Berol Karisma range, now unfortunately discontinued. For each book I write, the paper is authorised for writing on by means of a coloured stripe along the top edge. I fan the sheets out and colour a stack at a time. The current book is a warm blend of Karisma Pumpkin Orange and Faber Castell Venetian Red. I sometimes think I should make it clear which key I’m writing a particular passage in – D minor, at the moment – but that would be silly, unlike colouring the pages, which makes perfect sense.

In front of me there’s a little aneroid barometer, a present from my son Tom, which also tells me the temperature and the humidity. Near that is a piece of equipment given to me by the scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which came out of an instrument that detects dark matter, or tries to. It’s a cylinder of glass in a copper casing, about the size of a small snowball but much heavier. I use it as a paperweight for my current manuscript, so it can go on detecting dark matter, or Dust, when I’m not around. I also keep some binoculars handy so I can watch any interesting birds through the window. The village heron lumbers past occasionally, and right now there’s a red kite circling over the church tower.

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