Suffolk

Suffolk is even more isolated (in some respects) than the cottage up North! I have no phone signal at all her – not for miles, and, of course, no internet. I’m am going to load this into the phone on the off change that I get a signal while walking today.

The studio itself is one end of a thatched barn, at the end of a range that includes a house, a furniture-maker's workshop, a potter’s workshop and a teashop. That sounds crowded and noisy, but it isn’t. In fact we have barely heard a soul since arriving.

The barn has been beautifully converted and furnished by the furniture maker, Graham Hussey and his wife Honor, the potter; it’s all wood, and has a the dry oaky smell I recognise from the 18th Century boathouses at Portsmouth. It’s easy to spot the old and new beams, but not from any lack of harmony between them. Some of the original weatherboard has been reused and lime-washed, and the fingers can trace out the graffito of the 19th children who played here – a complete alphabet, two little boats (the higher the better drawn, as fits the older child) and a date, 1892.

In short, it’s light, and bright, and warm and airy, with great views and striking open plan sleeping gallery. I would recommend it to any one looking for a quiet week with a friend.

In the meantime I am reading the blogs of 1941 – “Private Battles” edited by Simon Garfield, the latest addition to his collection of Mass Observation Diaries, which now cover 1938 – 47. (“Our Hidden Lives”, “We are at War”.

Informative, curious, gossipy, intimate, astonishing – the everyday life of men and women in the 1940s is compulsive reading, and the long dead contributors (“Herbert Brush”, amateur poet, 83, “B Charles”, perpetually pursed antique dealer with an eye for working class boys, “Pam Ashford”, thirty-something secretary in Glasgow with a satirical pen and a difficult canary) will live on in the imagination for years after.