WHAT'S ON YOUR DESK?

LESLEY LOKKO

I can’t cheat and I can’t lie. It’s time to confess: I’m a neat-freak. Compulsively neat, obsessively tidy... an army child, you understand. Even worse, the child of an army surgeon. Home was as clean and hygienic as the operating theatre he worked in and unfortunately, it’s rubbed off. I simply can’t work in chaos. As the Germans put it, ‘Ordnung muss sein.’ There must be order. Without it... oh, it’s just too awful to contemplate.

So this is what my desk looks like: a white Apple Mac, white keyboard, white mouse, white mouse-mat. A dark blue printer (I tried to get a white one!)... small bowl of roses (pink, not white); a silver angle-poise lamp and an IKEA wooden filing-tray that is always scrupulously clean. My phone sits neatly at right angles to the lamp, and the coffee cup has its own coaster. Ever since I discovered the joys of iStore, I no longer have an unsightly cluster of CDs on my desk. Music is now but a click away. I like it. Now that I’ve written it down, however, I’m beginning to wonder...

On the (white) shelf above my head, however, there’s a little more life, a little less rigidity, more spontaneity. I never write without the treasured copy of my favourite book, Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature somewhere in sight. When I sold my first novel, I swore that a signed copy of that book (which, more than anything else, was the reason I decided to become a writer) would be the very first thing I bought with that all-important cheque. And it was. It sits on the left-hand side of the shelf, bracketed by my Filofax and a tube of hand-cream. There are a couple of ‘arty’ pieces from Ghana, where I grew up and where I now live part of the year (with an identical desk set-up, I must add. Ordnung muss sein, even overseas!) – a silver Tuareg teaspoon, destined to bring luck and wealth to those who sup from it; a carved calabash of no particular use; a small ochre-coloured clay pot of stamps and several photographs of my family, including the army surgeon, benevolently presiding over the glorious orderliness below.

But, underneath my desk, tucked away almost out of sight, is a gigantic (white) box. And, like most self-confessed neat-freaks, that’s where the real story lies. Open it and a glorious muddle assaults the eye – paperwork, crumpled receipts, rubber bands, discarded pens, staples, thirty year old photographs, including a yellowed, fading postcard with the numbers ‘18’ mysteriously stamped on it, floppy disks, used-up phone cards, letters waiting patiently to be filed and the odd sock. I’m reminded of the early Victorians in their efforts to establish the first encyclopaedia. Like the Germans, they were obsessed with order, with everything finding and having a place. They invented categories through which the world could be understood – botany, biology, history, science, the arts – all natural (and unnatural) phenomena had a name and a category, the earliest science of taxonomy, I suppose. Everything in its rightful place. And then there was the far-flung, mysterious seventh category into which they tossed everything that didn’t fit. What a wonderfully creative, inventive, unexpected place! Hemlock rubbing shoulders with animals for whom there were no names; inventions for which no use had been established; changelings and magical things that couldn’t be explained. Chaotic, unpredictable and gloriously wild. The parable of my desk... and the box below it, methinks.

Lesley is half-Ghanaian, half-Scottish and has grown up in Ghana and the UK. She began her writing career when as an impoverished student she saw an article in Time Out about how to write a bestseller. Her first novel Sundowners took her ten years to write but sold 100,000 copies.

Lesley is a trained architect and has designed and supervised the building of her own house in Ghana from sustainable materials. She divides her time between there and Hackney in London (where the view is quite different!) in order to concentrate on her writing career.

Her third novel Bitter Chocolate is published by Orion in January 2008.
 

FACTOTUM
(2005)

Written by:
Charles Bukowski
Bent Hamer


Starring:
Matt Dillon
Lili Taylor
Marisa Tomei


Based on Bukowski's
semi-autobiographical novel,
this edgy drama follows a
hard drinking, rebellious writer
with no desire to live
a conventional lifestyle.  

 

SAY WHAT? Misused Words

wont - accustomed [to]; habit.
      "The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world."

won't – contraction of will not.
      "I'm afraid she won't see you."
 

A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING

In November 1975, the Russian frigate Storozhevoy docked in the Baltic port of Riga to participate in a commemoration of the October Revolution. Its political officer, Captain Valery Sablin, thought this the perfect time to protest against what he perceived as the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev era.

The next evening, Sablin locked the captain in his cabin and seized control of the ship. He planned to steer it out of the Bay of Riga to Leningrad. There, he would broadcast a nationwide address to the people in hopes of causing a revolt. He told the crew if they didn’t want to be a part of his plan, they could lock themselves in their cabins to avoid being implicated. One junior officer managed to escape and went straight to the authorities. At that point, Sablin considered abandoning the project, but the crew urged him on.

When Leonid Brezhnev learned of the mutiny, he ordered the Storozhevoy sunk. Sixty planes and thirteen ships set out to hunt for the rebels. By dawn the first wave of planes from the Baltic fleet air wing reached the Storozhevoy, but they refused a direct order to fire on it. The second wave of planes did drop their bombs and a SU-24 attack aircraft managed to crack the hull, disabling it.

Six hours after it began, the mutiny ended.

Years later, an insurance salesman in Baltimore, Maryland, who’d always wanted to be a writer, read about the Storozhevoy. The story not only intrigued him, it awoke the storyteller within. In a mere six months, he’d written a novel so accurate in its descriptions of military equipment and tactics that former Navy Secretary John Lehman said if the author had served in the Navy, he would’ve been court-martialed for revealing too much top-secret information.

The Hunt for Red October hit the bookstores in 1984, and Tom Clancy began a thrilling new career.

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