I have arrived at Prospect Cottage. 

I’m curled like a cat on the green velvet sofa, nestled down amongst tatty yellow cushions, basking in the warmth. It’s late October, and after a cold week the sun is glorious here in Dungeness, lifting the heads of red and pink flowers in pots lined up before the large window. Beyond the window is a flat shingle-desert, with pylons leading away electricity to more civilised towns, and also Dungeness Power Station – Jarmin’s Emerald City. 

Derek Jarmin moved here just after the Chernobyl disaster, as others worried about the cloud of reactor waste travelling overhead, and catching cancer, his nearest neighbour was a nuclear power station. 

It wasn’t cancer, of course, but AIDS that transported Derek over the rainbow. In his lifetime he was many things, to many people, and his diagnosis catapulted him to his final role: campaigner. He went public with his diagnosis immediately – this in a time when tv adverts showed a gravestone being etched with the four letters, when the dsiseas was a death sentence and there were laws banning the ‘encouragement’ of homosexuality. Derek became a figurehead for the Queer rights movement, a touchstone for proud unapologetic love in the face of hate and prejudice. 

He was brave. Maybe that was why he didn’t mind living next to a power station. 

People come here. I’m inside, outside are other pilgrims. They may come because of the films, the writing, the queer history, or the garden. It is a vegetated shingle of cactuses – cacti? – and found things. In the home too are found things: shells, hag stones on a rope, barbed wire and twists of branches. At Prospect Cottage, lost things become precious and beautiful. Revered, placed on shelf or on a grassy mound, adorned with twine or worn. Drain was sensitive to objects, to dead flowers and gnarly rocks, the space is infused with emotion and sex, soft like this sofa. 

I hadn’t expected to feel so much warmth. 

The arm chair is sagging, the springs visible, the armrest threadbare. I want to sink inside, rub the worn velvet with my cheek and know there is a value in age and wear. This chair doesn’t beed recovering – or recovery – and neither do I. The cushions are exposing their insides and that’s okay. It’s safe here. 

Not being perfect is more than acceptable, it’s valued. Let us value wear and tear, the scars we won. Let me accept my own loose stitchings and not seek a fix. These things – Dereks and Keith’s – are not damaged. 

They are well-loved. Love. Surrounded by yellow, the colour of hope. 

It is the afternoon. 

The clock chimes, a tall masculine wooden coffin of a clock made by Andrew Marsh, a close copy of my husband’s name before I married him and we both changed our identity, merged. I sit, clock-ticked, at Derek’s desk as visitors tramp across the shingle and take photos, only noticing I’m looking at them when they look at the screen. I smile and wave. I’m a visitor too and it’s my fault – I’ve removed the curtain. Like Derek, I like light and visitors – he’d invite them in for tea, and I would too, only I was advised not too. I’m here to work, after all. 

His study is wood-panelled, wood-ceilinged, wood-floored. The art is dark too – charred books burned onto canvas with red paint. Also frogs. A variety of small pottery and glass and amber frogs, on the desk. I don’t know why but I like it. Pencils in those plastic holes meant for buds, a bloom of lead. And the incredible hulk, He-man – boys toys turned indecent with a small statue of Venus watching on. 

Hagstones – whole belts of them, dangling off nails and pieces of wood. A light that doesn’t work. Derek was a collector of sticks and stones and lost things which, dog-like, he brought back to his home and repurposed into art. And then of course I saw the camera and realise I am being monitored – not the watcher, but the watched. A quick re-trace of steps – what did I touch? 

I settled down again, but with the air of someone on display. Thinking of space – of what it means to be here, of the empty space I carry within that is seeking the warmth of this day. The elements are all outside, and I am protected by the ghosts. 

“Busy old fool, unruly sun.” I hear a woman reading the power, that is on the wall of the cottage I painstaking wooden letters. Trying to decipher the rest of the poem, as I did, back in my A Leven English class. 

“Oh my god, there’s someone in there!”

Me. Even for just one day I feel like a custodian, proactive. Waving to the pilgrims – it’s okay. It really is okay. 

I feel peace here. Part of something, bigger than me. 

It is a friendly space and I do not feel alone. 

My thanks to the custodian’s of Prospect Cottage, I feel honoured to have had the opportunity to spend time there.