a place to write

I am a lucky girl. For my birthday, my flatmates gave me a beautiful multi-coloured hammock. I'm afraid that, for the moment, it has superseded my armchair.

I lay in it this afternoon, writing in my notebook a review for Halfway Down the Stairs of Isaac Marion's new/upcoming novel, Warm Bodies. Already I can sense that in my hammock there is a good vibe for review-writing.

In it, I hang suspended slightly over the garden, swaying gently in the breeze. I feel isolated, private, but at the same time people walk past the fence immediately beside me and I listen to their voices, thrilled that they don't know I'm there. It's a slight contradiction.

Above me, I see leaves, with sunlight glinting through. In front of me, roses and the deck and my sandaled feet and my rainbow hammock. A butterfly darting about. Cobwebs that were invisible before. I raise my pen and write. The ideas come quickly and freely.

I am going to have to exercise great self-control when it comes to this hammock. I feel that perhaps there should be a fairy tale about a hammock that bewitches those who lie within it, because that is the effect it is having on me.

At least, I suppose, I can read and write in it, with old-fashioned pen and paper. If I read more books because I become addicted to my hammock, is that a bad thing?