I don't recall when I got this desk, but I must have had it when I stopped sharing a room with my sister for the second time, after my brother left home. This makes it about 14 years old. It replaced a wood laminate one I inherited off my uncle (RIP Eric) that had an increasingly outdated map of the world printed on it. On that desk I learnt how countries could change their names: USSR, Malagasy, Burma.
This desk, this desk was cheap and nasty with a chipboard frame, plastic runners and cardboard drawers. On it, I studied for my HSC, researched uni assignments and wrote the first draft of my novel. My first, second and third laptops got to know it well.
The top drawer was always for greeting cards and letter stationery and envelopes. The second drawer came to be a dumping ground for receipts and invoices to be filed. The third drawer was always for financial documents and tax stuff and the bottom drawer, by the end of its life, had turned a museum of electronic odds and ends: cables that no longer connected anything to anything else, random charging units, wires with double heads.
The cupboard housed everything from my collection of postcards and my handwritten short stories, poems, novels and ideas, to old daybooks with fading appointments and a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings of articles and pictures I liked.
The desk moved with me from West Pennant Hills to Waverton to Artarmon. Then, as a freelancer for the second time, I got busy. I needed more space. I bought a former office desk secondhand that now takes up an entire corner of my downstairs living area.
The desk was picked up this evening after I listed it for free on Gumtree and Freecycle. I hope it went to a good home.
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