At my desk I sat down and smiled.

It’s 7.47pm and I am writing of sound mind and body at my desk in the tiny corner of the globe that is reserved entirely for me.

It’s sunny in here.

Actually that’s a lie but allow me that poetic license, because it was this morning. And somewhere in the corner of my desk the sunrays have been captured and are still radiating heat. In this I firmly believe.

My desk is old. It’s vintage. It’s positively antique. Currently it holds more interest for me than the long dead historian whose dismally long sentences I am trying to decipher. If I squint I can imagine my desk lost beneath rolls of parchment and piles and piles of ink blotched papers upon which an ageing man is scribbling his memoirs, to be read one day 200 years later by a disinterested history student on the other side of the world. I can imagine a distinctly English gentleman of the colonist variety, tucked away in some godforsaken corner of Africa sketching the behaviour of the natives, his desk the only piece of furniture to remind him of home, that chip in the wood a reminder of a stray bullet that tore through his hut, the painting on the top shelf a fading memory of the distant Scottish highlands. I can hear the gentle tapping of a young woman’s shoe on the footrest as she writes her best friend, her would be lover, telling him of the terrible drought and the rigours of the home front while he rots in some shallow grave on the fields of France.

Perhaps this is the very desk upon which a grand narrative will be composed, perhaps it is here in the pages of this book or other that my partially completed manifesto will be found, after I wander off into the jungle one day and do not return to type those final words, and thus leave the world wondering... whatever happened to her purple striped socks?

Here I am Lord of all that happens, and queen of all that may one day come to pass... Even though it’s just a Thursday, I am just a girl and this is just my desk.