• A reading tower called Ark, designed by Rintala Eggerstsson Architects, part of the Small Spaces architecture show at the V&A.

  • Perfect chill out reading spot.

  • More from the reading tower.

A little dreaming

27 July 2010

We’ve had a tough couple of months. A lot of hard-core reality checks. Too many spread sheets. Working crazy hours. I can’t get to sleep and Britt keeps having early anxiety wake ups.

The reality checks have been about money and trying to make the numbers work. But it’s been bigger than that. Much bigger. At the core, the last few months have been about asking ourselves what our ambitions are, what we’re really setting out to do here and how we do that without getting stuck into the predictable ways of doing things.

To help clear her head, Britt ended up re-reading the Arts Council proposal we had written over a year ago. And it made us realise that we’ve been sticking to our guns with some stuff, but not everything. Britt sent me a few emails copying and pasting bits of the proposal and saying things like “we’ve done this, which is great”, but “we also said we were going to do this and we haven’t. Why not?” Turns out we got more side-lined than we thought, so we’ve been re-thinking those areas again and trying to get more focused.

My way to re-evaluate, digest and reflect, was to take the day off and go with my six year old daughter Bella to the Small Spaces show at the V&A yesterday. I was really blown away by most of it, but mostly the reading tower.

For me, the reading tower was all about feeling safe, protected, cuddled and carried away to some dreamy faraway place. And call me a dreamer, but I still think that feeling only seems possible when you’re surrounded by lots and lots of beautiful books.

I guess the point of all this rambling is to say: whether it’s Britt’s business brain going back to something we set out to do over a year ago or my head in the clouds brain hiding away in a tower of books, we both feel like, no matter what, we need to just keep sticking to our gut.

And not forget to do a little dreaming here and there.

—Anna

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