I found myself a little neutral space on the threshold between two rooms. I had taken up position there, at a tangential angle to the areas where stuff was going on. Unfortunately, I was quite close to the door to the toilets so people thought i was waiting for the cubicle to become free and they said things like are you in a queue? How can I be in a queue on my own? But let that pass. Then I thought I’d better find another neutral space where I could have my private neutral thoughts, so I went into an area where I could look at a wall for a bit at another angle (maybe an obtuse one) and then I had people coming up to me saying are you all right? and I said yeah, I’m just thinking. You see, I’m ahead of the curve on this one. The fight for neutral non-defining space where you can liberate your thinking is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. The space needs to be in a non-zone, out of a room really, on some stairs for example where you can take up temporary residence between the normal lfe levels. Children have always liked these non-spaces: stairs; behind settees, patches of floor, where they are exploring the options for escape within the dimension of verticality. We adults have to be sneakier to get our spaces. Of course, the cafe has become the work space for many these days. You pop in for a drink and all the tables are taken by individuals sitting at tables for four with laptops and all their sheets spread out all over the surfaces. I don’t blame them. Probably at home they have a tiny space jammed full of commodities, or, even worse, other people. Other peope are the great obstruction in our lives and we need to be as wily as Lionel Messi to escape their touch-tight marking. And like Messi, the best solution for finding space is often to keep on the move. Hence the fact that the only way many of us can think straight is when we are shuttling from one confining space to another.

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