Recent poem: ‘It all comes down to this’
October 10, 2009
It all comes down to this
long corridors and short stops
to let the late joiners catch up with the group.
A guide’s voice floats over me,
carrying another story to a tapestry
that has already soaked up too many words.
I half-close my eyes so I can see some of those old words
leaking onto the intricate patterns on the floor.
“This last room was a special salon -
the original chatelaine spent nearly all her time here
and only allowed her closest women friends as guests.
It has a rare set of design features adapated just for her
and an even rarer positioning within the chateau -so rare it is famous,
even among all the chateaux in this region.”
It all comes down to this:
the women who used this salon
were all left-handed.
A coincidence?
Not for them.
****************
After many tours of castles, chateaux, stately homes etc and seeing them in documentaries and movies, I’ve occaisionally thought about how really unusuual, difficult design features affecting the entire building were accomodated in the construction process. Probably only a tiny proportion of castles were ever genuinely and completely designed for left-handed people, as the orientation of rooms, stairwells, inner defences etc were designed on the basis of 90% + of people being right-handed. Related to this is a question about how specific areas within a grand residence might be customised even more if particular people due to live there managed to ‘get their way’. Over an extended time, how might this specialised space affect the way they lived in their home and how they related to others?
