Coffee pot

This is a corner of my kitchen. I love my house. Not this house in particular -- although my affair of the heart with this airy eyrie in Berlin unfolds fern-frondily -- but whatever house is the one I'm calling mine. The language of inside spaces is the only one I speak softly and with my eyes instead of loudly, presto and with my hands, which is how I speak of everything. Everything else. A tension pulls at me over my fervour, as though it's empty or misdirected somehow, only right for a backdrop to the Really Things.

I love shelves and floors, glasses and windows, door handles and light switches and the hum of the refrigerator, the personality of chairs and the soothing no-nonsense you get from tables, any table. Even the one whose leg needs a folded napkin under it. Mixing bowls, scissors, saucepans and cabinets on castors, painted pools of lamplight, a cushion, another cushion, a blanket, a curtain, a book wherever you've left one which is everywhere, soft rustle-rustle leaf-litter layers of textiles and paper.

Piles of dishes and platters on the shelves and spoons and whisks leaning on their one foot against the edges of jugs, humming the sounds of your cooking and the chink and clatter and laughter of people, others always the happy token of massed plates and your motley crew of glassware. Quilts and too many pillows on the bed and something snug over a chair, the quietly euphoric sense of governed oversupply that launches your house, your small temperamental body and strange social customs half a step from satisfaction in the second drawer down on the left.

Twine and pencils in the study and postcards from not here, ziggly things to hold your paper, rugs that fight and marry and a reading lamp. The doors open to let the world in and when it gets late it folds its walls and floors and lets your world of idiosyncratic craziness be the only way things are.