Archie – Year 10 Student
Editor’s Note: Year 10 English Language students were tasked with writing descriptively about the room in which they were working; this gem comes from Archie. MJP
Upon a hill in North Yorkshire, there sits a house half swallowed by nature. Behind the coarse stone and scratched glass, there is an office where a young boy is working. The shelves are cluttered with broken folders, scrap paper littered with doodles and ancient stationary with cuts, snaps and teeth marks. Huge, towering pillars of folders are locked together like Tetris blocks. The room was filled with strange trinkets and commodities; a half-painted Millennium Falcon, an unopened tiny souvenir Roman helmet from a school trip that happened seven years previously, even a small box of dominoes, which were left there by mistake, just to be forgotten. Every object has a story; every pen, every book, and every scrap of paper. None of it remembered.
At the desk there is a PC, left on; its screen idly beaming light into the quiet office. A paused video on one screen, lines of unfinished code on the other. In front of the large ergonomic keyboard, which was temporarily pushed up to the foot of the monitor, sat a School laptop. The boy sat there hastily typing away, waiting for today’s online lesson to end. Today’s task was an English Language essay on describing the room you’re in. So he wrote on his silver laptop, with its matt black keys, about how he was sitting in his room, the light shining gracefully through the windows, showing the dust rising and falling through the air like hidden waves of the ocean. The curtains sliced the beams into three distinct sections, each giving illumination to its own section of the, otherwise unlit, room. Under the window was an old, antique desk. Sitting on the desk there was a set of old, cheap, plastic earphones: adjacent, a brand new iPod, a birthday gift from a grandparent.
Next to the iPod, there sat a student, typing away at his laptop, describing his room. He described the Whiteboards and posters that hung on the walls. The shining whiteboards reflected the noble sunlight, whereas the dark coloured posters did nothing but absorb and hoard light. They depicted great bands such as Radiohead, Rush and the Rolling Stones as well as more obscure artists such as Beach House, Temples and Alvvays. Amongst the posters were much older objects; old wall lights, oil paintings and rusty light switches and sockets. Under the posters and paintings there was a boy, who thought it witty to write a descriptive text about writing a descriptive text, an inception-style exploration of the same room.
He was writing, on his scratched and dented laptop, about the rough carpet.
The carpet was harsh on the feet, old and worn. In remote corners, it was still as fresh and fluffy as the day of its installation; those areas too remote for anything to stand on, or make use of. The carpet was decorated with small balls of dust and dirt, even some mud trodden in by the dog that sat idly on the floor. Amongst the carpet’s material were clear indentations from where chairs have sat for years, slowly flattening the threads. It was here, on one of those chairs, a boy pondered, thinking it witty to describe a room in which he describes a room, in a form of English Inception.
The GSAL Journal 