In 2021, I thought about the wood that made my desk

Published on 19 December 2021

The bureau is filled with all the things I need to do my job. Moleskine notebooks in primary colours spilling pages covered in must dos, should dos, and could dos. Super sticky neon Post-its nudging me to be better with wise words borrowed or stolen from inspirational colleagues past and present. Uni-ball Signo gel grip rollerball pens (black, one dozen).

This is not my first bureau-deo. I bought one in 2007 from a second hand shop on Bethnal Green Road using a month’s worth of my student loan. It was a dainty, glossy mahogany thing, with a soft green leather writing pad that had absorbed the pressure of hundreds of addresses written on hundreds of Christmas cards, birthday cards, job applications, and love letters since it was made in the 1920s.

Last year, in a fit of practicality and work-from-home fever, I swapped that one for the bureau that had sat in my mother’s office throughout her life. A warmer, chunkier, brighter unit in practical oak. More functional than fussy. Early 1960s Ercol, I think. One drawer. Two pigeon holes. And a broad, hardwood writing surface that, unlike the cushioned leather of the art deco socialite’s bureau, resists written words and pushes them back towards you, up through the page. Did you mean to write that? Really?

I like this bureau because when you sit at it and pull down the flap, the hinges groan so loudly it almost becomes a scream. This both announces my arrival at work in a particularly powerful way, and also sounds a cry of despair – a complaint to anyone in earshot. Here we are, again, exchanging labour in return for money. Money that we will use to buy more paper and pens or perhaps a new laptop so we can continue to labour.

I groan along with the bureau. I begin slowly with a noise that matches the squeaking of metal and wood. Waaahhhhhh. And then the sound extends into a desperate sentence. Waaaaahhhhhyyyyyy am I here? For someone who has built this entire idea of myself around my career, my groan-scream is the start of an existential crisis. Who am I if not someone who sits at a desk and writes? What happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?

‘Enmeshment’ and ‘codependency’ are words therapists use to describe a situation where boundaries between people become so blurred the individual identities are lost. There’s no stable, independent sense of self. As I run my fingers over the grain of the bureau and press my fingerprints deep into the knots and splits in the wood so they pinch back at me, I wonder if I am enmeshed, not with another person, but with my career and my life at this desk.

I peer closely at the patterns in the wood. Earthly, pontilist flecks float across an estuary-coloured background. They are claw marks and fireworks and punctuation. All I can say for certain is that the main panels and all the dividers of the desk are made from oak and there’s a boney, creamy handle on the tiny drawer. The oak was probably torn from a vast, connected forest in North America or a 2,300 species-strong sustainable woodland in Europe, but how would I know. 

I try hard not to think about the pale handle being part of an elephant once upon a time. But that’s no worse than the oak, which was formerly a wild, ancient tree and – presumably – never had any intention of seeing out its days as a writing desk. It didn’t have much choice when it came to being manipulated into a piece of structured and purposeful office furniture with rings no longer organically recording the shifting seasons but instead providing a space to display a tasteful matching perpetual calendar. 

God, I need a hobby. Something just for me.

I withdraw my hand from the grain but it snags at my palm and leaves a splinter there, dark and pale beneath the layers of skin. I push myself back from the bureau causing a carefully balanced cup of tea to rock so violently it gives the tree’s rootless carcass its first taste of water in 55 years. Enjoy it, I mutter, shutting the bureau gently as it scroans.