LRN No. 51: Me & My Mess

Plus: top secret Post-It Notes

India Knight’s hugely successful Substack has an occasional feature called ‘Me & My Desk’. Writers share images of their often serene, inspiring work environment - the latest features a vase of peonies on Poorna Bell’s mango wood desk - and answer some questions about where and how they work.

This is where I work.

I’m sharing this because I want to demystify both mess and work. I am very organised and very messy. (Believe it or not, I actually gave my desk a tidy a few days ago, which is why you can see some of the actual desktop.) I accumulate things and I don’t think about putting anything away. I know exactly where everything is, because things are either where they are supposed to be, or they’re on my desk.

The desk itself is a really ugly toughened glass thing I bought from John Lewis more than 20 years ago. But I can never change it: I have come to depend on that antiquated pull-out keyboard drawer for my notebooks and transcripts and scraps of paper for doodling. I have some nice things to fidget with stashed there - some stones collected on my travels and presents from my kids - as well as practical things like earplugs (because of aforementioned beloved kids) and lipstick in case I need to glam up for a TV appearance over Zoom.

On the walls either side of the window are an enormous number of Post-It Notes, displayed in a matrix, and I’m not going to show you those because they are top secret. They contain lists of ideas and forthcoming projects, podcast episodes and chapters of works in progress.

When people ask me what my writing routine is, I tell them that I sit down to work and I work. There is no ritual to complete before I begin, beyond fixing myself a coffee. I get on with it. You kind of have to, don’t you? Write something, anything, get words down that can be finessed, cut, shaped, turned into something you’re happy to share. I’m sure if I cared about tidiness I would get a lot less writing done.

I dream of having a work space that’s high up in the attic of a tall Victorian house with sweeping views over London, and my very own barista coffee machine plus Quooker tap for tea. But this is me for now, on the lower ground floor of my home, subterranean enough to be lovely and cool in a heatwave. And peaceful, too - if you can locate the earplugs.

There are lots of things on my Post-It Notes that I really want to tell you about. One big thing, in particular, which will be hitting your ears in the autumn. More news of that to come in a few weeks.

In the meantime, it’s festival season. I’ll soon be on the road again, first to OffGrid Sessions on Osea (a tidal island on the Thames where Amy Winehouse once went to rehab) and then to the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. I’m doing two sessions in Edinburgh - one on The Price of Life, with Devi Shridhar, and another on mental health in the digital age. Come and say hi if you’re around.

Things that have caught my eyes and ears:

• strongly recommend Missing in the Amazon, which follows the hellish story of the disappearance of journalist Dom Phillips indigenous defender Bruno Pereira. The podcast is presented by the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, with whom I once got lost in the Amazon myself

• sighed in despair reading Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thomson’s book on Biden’s decline and those who tried to cover it up

• squirmed in horror at The Astroworld Tragedy, the Netflix documentary investigating how ten young people ended up crushed to death at a festival in Houston while Travis Scott played on

• delighted in sitting on a bench that buzzed with bass in the Barbican’s car park as part of its aptly named Feel the Sound exhibition.