Prof Chair, in the library, with the dining table

I can't say that a dining-room has ever been particularly high on the list of things I really wanted one day. When I was small I always much preferred it when we ate perched on stools around the kitchen worktop. It was only really after my sister had lived in fashionable London for a few years that she started insisting on eating in what we had previously referred to as the Front Room (but which appeared to have been forcibly renamed the Dining Room) whenever she visited, a habit which was unfortunately picked up and which then spread to when either of us visited even though only one of us was insisting on using the room. As well as being particularly ill-lit it carried an air of unfortunate stiffness and formality as a place of eating as it had only ever previously been used in that capacity during winter festive period, often when various grandmothers were in attendance. As a non-dining room it was quite homely and had been the main famblyroom for some time after moving to that house, probably until the newness wore off the sofa in the other room or until we were trusted to be in the same room as the record player for any length of time. The concept of a dining-room therefore has a slightly cold, negative air about it. We obviously never had a library though there was a short corridor full of bookshelves between my room and the rest of the house and libraries in general are fun and happy places. As what Nicky now refers to as the dining room is small enough that our old bookshelf and new bookshelf take up almost all of one wall I shall probably attempt to keep referring to it as the library, though it was also functioning briefly as a studio this afternoon and (now that my bicycle has been retrieved from the cupboard under the stairs in the stair of the flat) will be a temporary garage until I can knock together some sort of external bicycle-storage device seeing as both the plastic shedlet-things are just slightly too small to comfortably store either bicycle without detaching one or more wheels or inverting the bicycle first.