Top Desk

Back in the early 80s, when I was knee high to most of the population, two unrelated events occurred across my relations. My aunt bought my cousin a small, white, plain desk as part of a plan to redecorate his bedroom. Meanwhile one of my uncles, living down south, continued to collect comics. In particular, 2000 A.D.

From time to time, he would come back to visit the family and he would leave a copy of the universe’s greatest comic lying around. Some of those covers are still burned into my brain. I was used to bright, smiling, happy comics back then. The Beano, The Dandy. The many TV tie-ins which I suspect were mainly sold to fill my parents’ house with cheap, tacky free toys. I was constantly warned away from my uncle’s comics, but they looked like the strangest, scariest, most fascinating things in the world to me and it wasn’t long before I started sneaking a peak at Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Slaine, Nemesis and the ABC Warriors.

At some point in the mid 80s, when I was no longer looking people in the knees, we ended up taking my cousin’s unused desk off my auntie’s hands. It came with us to Leicestershire, where I think it was intended to go into my room for homework. Instead, it went into the spare bedroom, where it gathered dust until the day my dad brought a computer. An Atari XE. One of the generation which came with a tape deck and advice on how best to pray it didn’t crash.

For a while, that little white desk was happy in that room, even when we were slamming our hands against it and cursing a game for killing us yet again. Over time, the technology sitting on top of it improved. We had a NES up there. Then a Megadrive. A SNES. I have some vivid memories of playing on that Sega, using an arcade style controller which stuck down using little, rubber sucker feet. Occasionally, you’d flinch or get swept up fighting an end of level boss and the whole damn desk would move.

In the 90s, we moved again and the desk came with us. This time, it went into my bedroom and it became a definite homework station. I think it’s pretty fair to say I hated that desk for a while. It was the lair of my nemesis. It was a little piece of school territory which had snuck, uninvited, into my bedroom.

Thankfully, though, I’d found a handy escape from homework. Comics. By now, my fascination with them had evolved into a pretty mighty addiction. I collected 2000 A.D., for obvious reasons. Along with its sister magazine, the Judge Dredd Megazine. I also collected anything interesting which took my fancy. I read a lot of Aliens, Terminator and Predator comics. I read plenty of Marvel and DC. A dash of MAD magazine and quite a lot of Vertigo titles, mainly because they always looked the most interesting. That was my real homework, as far as I was concerned.

There was also another escape that I started to experiment with back then: writing stories. I’d written little ideas and doodled for as long as I could remember. Now I had a desk, though, I started to really try and write something complete. It wasn’t anything definite to begin with. There were a lot of first drafts which were a little too desperate to be dark and wild and strange as I attempted to figure out how to tell stories using the many stories I’d come into contact with as I’d grown up. All of my illegible, left handed scribbles were tucked into the two drawers that desk had to offer. They only came out when the homework was cleared away, if not necessarily finished.

By the early 2000s, the homework was finished forever. The desk had gone through GCSEs and A Levels with me. Now it waited patiently in my bedroom when I went off to work every day. At weekends and evenings, if I wasn’t going to the pub, I would sit at it and keep writing. Its drawers were beginning to overflow now, whilst my comics collection had damn near filled the built in cupboard in the opposite corner of my room.

Its whole back wall was taken up by teetering, imposing piles of my uncle’s old 2000 A.D. collection. In an attempt to downsize, he’d passed them onto me. They came with old, black and white copies of Valiant and Starlord (not the Marvel guy). The entire run of a crazy little comic called Toxic. Some early issues of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed comic adaptation and Legends of the Dark Knight, some Sandman and Hellblazer.

The really old comics in particular which were taking up too much room. They were falling apart and bleeding dusty spores whenever you opened the cupboard. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with them until I started to go out with friend of mine.

We’d realised we were becoming more than just friends and had decided to chance a date or two to see what happened. It would be a couple more years until we moved in together and a few more until we got married. I can still remember Sam suggesting we could take the old comics, cut them up and use them to decorate my desk, which was looking a little tired.

You see? This is why I keep telling everyone that she’s the brains of the operation.

We spent a weekend first going through all the comics and taking out the splash pages and most eye catching images. Then we helped the older, black and white issues to finally come apart. They went onto the desk first, forming a base layer, covering every part of that desk. The top, the sides, the underside. Then we added the larger, more colourful artwork. Thanks to the amount of spray mount we had to use, it was quite the lightheaded day.

I loved that desk after that. I truly did. It felt special. It felt like a perfect piece of furniture, just for me. I wrote poetry at that desk and fantasy stories. I wrote my first two novel length ideas there, from start to finish. (Which were both terrible.) The desk came with me and Sam to our first house, where it basically had its own room again. A room it shared, naturally, with a lot of comics.

While it was in that room, I sat down one morning and wrote something I’d never attempted before: a ghost story. I enjoyed writing it so much that I decided to self-publish it. Then I repeated the process a few more times before I found myself a publisher and then I worked on my first actual novel at that desk. We’d moved house again before I finished my second novel on it. By then, I’d written podcast episodes on that desk. I’d written stories submitted to magazines and anthologies and even a couple of failed attempts that’d been sent to Big Finish for their Doctor Who short story competition.

Of course, as all this went on, I was beginning to realise the unthinkable - I was outgrowing my desk. It was designed for a kid. If I spent more than a few hours working on it, I was left with an aching back and sore shoulders. Still, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I guess, in many ways, it was the pandemic which really brought things to a head. Working from home and writing every morning showed me that I couldn’t sit at that desk, day after day, any longer. It was time for me to move onto a bigger desk.

This morning, as I write this, I’m sitting at my new desk. It’s deeper and taller and made from dark wood. It’s pretty grown up, only it doesn’t feel like home yet. Especially not when I’m writing. That home is currently downstairs, stashed behind a sofa, until we can figure out what to do with it. I have a horrible feeling it’s destined to end up in a skip. After all, I can’t see any Chris Long museums calling for it anytime soon and we don’t know anyone with kids who like 2000 A.D. comics enough to want a desk plastered in them. I guess, in the end, maybe it became such a part of me that it won’t fit anywhere else.

Now, as the Victoria’s Lift miniseries begins to be released, I’ll have to remember that those stories were the last to ever be completed on that fantastic old desk of mine. All of those comic book panels looking up at me as I tried to weave that 10 part plot together and conjure some strange, dark shadows from my head. Shadows which I first learnt how to cast onto a page when I was sitting at that fantastic, one of a kind desk of mine.