‘Air and light and time and space’ is the title of Helen Sword’s analysis of “how successful academics write”.
I have air in the garage, and time, and space. Light, however, has been sadly missing – which really shouldn’t be the case since the back of our house is often bathed in beautiful, golden afternoon sunlight.
Stopping that light reaching me has been a huge bay tree, planted by the previous owners and trained into a cone and then retrained into a mushroom, and then allowed to just grow, and grow, and GROW… and I mean GROW. It had gotten so big that to walk out the back door to get firewood was like the back-of-wardrobe journey to Narnia.
After a weekend of chainsaw choppery, the bay tree is no more.
Unfortunately, since it’s rained since I cut it down, I’m not sure what the effect on the light has been.
But I do know that we now have enough bay leaves for a century of stews.
The Garage of Books 