It has now been just over five weeks since our move to Italy and I am pleased to be able to say that my mind, body, and soul are settling down nicely. After months of hectic planning and organising I am finally taking a deep breath in our attic office/study. Through the chaos of the pandemic and the past year, I wrote all of my blog articles from my cupboard office - essentially an old boiler cupboard turned into an office - in the Lincolnshire Wolds. It was a tight space that was quite chilly but nevertheless, it was a space of my own.

Although there is still quite a lot of adjustment that needs to happen (I still have five large boxes of archival material which I aim to tackle one box at a time) I am delighted to be able to sit down at my desk and write this first blog article on a cool afternoon in Piemonte. 

Ever since I read Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) I always aimed to create a space where I could escape to enrich my intellect and to produce my own work. As “space” is an extremely expensive commodity in the UK this “space of my own” usually had to be a desk, or a table placed in a corner of the room. This was the case when I was a university student and later when I was working in the corporate world. In 2008, when I returned to Turkey to pursue my dream of becoming a translator and writer, and after a few months of living in my grandmother's spare bedroom, I got my first job as Assistant Editor at “P Culture and Arts Magazine”. One of the first things I did was to find myself a desk and set myself up in a corner of the lounge in a poorly insulated rented flat in Feriköy (it had a fantastic view of the Golden Horn and a leaking roof; a crying shame that I don’t have a photograph to share), and later, in another corner in another rented flat in Kurtuluş. For me, desk and library have always come before bed and wardrobe.  

Come to think of it, this is probably eleventh space of my own. I’ve lived in room shares, house shares, rented flats, terraced and semi-detached houses and everything in between. I never ever thought I would one day have an attic of my own, shared with someone I love. This new set up in Italy is more than anything I could have ever wished for. The attic is right above our living quarters and is accessed through a separate entrance. It has a kitchen area, an open plan space large enough to accommodate two's work needs and a fully equipped bathroom of its own. I love being able to sit at my desk under the skylight where I can sense the hours passing through the changing light and listen to the click-clack of pigeon claws. I love the time I spend in this kingdom of silent thought and research. 

I now realise I owe a big thank you to my mother, too.  My forward-thinking mum who had more sense than money and got a carpenter to build me a desk thirty-two years ago so that a six-year-old girl could have a space of her own for her own dreams. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Sitting at my desk, in an attic of my own...