Snuggery is informal British slang for a comfortable or cozy space. And that’s what my office is, behind the Green Man Pub. It’s actually a space specifically designed by me when I took the job as Pub Manager here at the Kinrowan Estate over a generation ago. Before me taking the job, the Pub Manager commandeered the Snug when he needed to do the books, and that’s how it had worked since the Pub was added here in the early eighteen hundreds.
But I wanted something more private than that. And something more permanent, as it was becoming obvious that the attendees of the various conferences, festivals, and such held here were making the Pub more profitable and more complex to manage. And even though Ingrid, my wife, as Estate Purchasing Agent does most of the Pub buying of spirits and all, I still need to keep track of inventory, customer drinking patterns, and work with Bjorn, our Brewmaster, on what we’ll be serving her as the seasons change.
Then I got an idea — the best Snuggery was a hidden one. Iain, our Librarian, has one that’s hidden under a staircase with the door being invisible unless you know how to find the latch in the wood paneling that opens it. Obviously mine couldn’t be that invisible but we decided that it could be made to look like nothing was back there. So the door is hidden behind a false set of shelving that very much looks deep to the eye, a fey custom designed spell, that swings inward to left me in and out.
I first had to find out what was behind the Pub. As luck would have it, there was a storage room there that actually had an exterior window, as it was built long before electricity was installed here. It was not that big — just twenty by twelve feet — but big enough. So I got one of the Estate lads who had drafting skills to help me design it.
We decided on a built in desk facing the greensward that sloped towards the area of forest called Oberon’s Wood, lots of bookshelves to hold countless ledgers, reference books, and various travel memorabilia I had such as the centuries old matryoshka, a set of Russian nested dolls that Ingrid, my wife, found in Moscow. Oh, and I keep my collection of rare single malt whiskies there.
So I requisitioned a Turkish rug from Estate stores, found a century-old office chair with a comfy leather seat that was also in stores, got a flat wall mounted heating unit put in, and had electricity installed. All in all, my Snuggery makes keeping the accounts almost pleasurable.
