I hope I hide it well…but that can be a dangerous and naive presumption. I’m at my best when convergent; and yet the divergent part is essential to the inclusiveness of the creative process.

I’m rambling on in a manner that is plainly self-indulgent, so let me explain…

It’s what I’ve come to think of as the ‘duff desktop’ that I’m musing about. The ‘non-duff desktop’ is what I briefly achieve when I clean up my writing desk; at the end giving it that swish of spray polish to add the all important smell of cleanliness to complement the pristine sense of clean space, of creative potential. At that moment, I look down and say to it, and myself, ‘And you are never going to look that bad, again!’

It’s as though I am scolding the simple wooden surface – implicated in the inevitable regeneration of the nests of paper scraps, books with ten bookmarks, fourteen pens, five notebooks of various sizes, electrical chargers and USB connectors, bills and bank statements; all of which rise, organically, from the ruin of my last ‘non-duff desktop’.