Writers' rooms: Charlotte Mendelson

Originally published in the GUARDIAN

This startlingly ugly room is where I try to write. But, awful as it looks, the Useless Room, aka the Hopeless Room, represents progress. Until recently, I worked in a sea of Sticklebriks in the sitting-room. Then we moved, and I cleverly chose the worst place in this sunny house - cold, close to a busy street, piled with toys and pans and our only phone - which will, one day, become part of the kitchen. I can't wait. Because by then we will have turned the shower room into my study, and I will swap the washing, and mustard, and plastic lavatories designed for families of toy hedgehogs, for a small damp cube of perfect privacy: "A Writer's 1.6 Metres". Until then I tune the radio loudly between stations, and pretend to myself that the door can shut.

This is Version 2.0. A month ago it was worse, then I put up encouraging objects. Now the horrible screen of boxes, behind which I hide from passers-by and road rage, is partially disguised by botanical postcards; Gwen John, Amelia Earhart and my grandmother; art by my children, to show that I'm sorry for shouting about the Sticklebriks; a mocked-up book jacket from when I left Jonathan Cape ("Follow Your Heart ... over three copies sold"); a framed Guardian review of Daughters of Jerusalem; the tube poster for When We Were Bad. The pencil pot is from Co Cork, near Ballymaloe, and the stone is from God knows where; I collect them and then they lose all meaning. The chair gives me back-ache, obviously. Other people have maps of Tibet or Wessex but mine are of Oxfordshire and London. And the box on the left is my in-tray; until last week it lived on the desk, and whenever I made an expansive hand gesture I'd knock the whole thing off and then just leave it, to increase my despair.

Almost nothing here is beautiful and the useful things are ugliest of all: yellowed phone, c.1989; Rolodex, c. 1994; dark brown sub-Anglepoise, c.1592. Will things improve when I move to my study? Probably not.