What’s your favorite word?
Snug has always been my word. It’s not just about comfort — it’s about containment. Safety without suffocation, warmth without grandeur. I’ve spent a lifetime searching for snug corners, as if each one could be a hearth where the world outside might quieten down for a while.
My first snug was our dog’s basket. I remember climbing into it as a boy when we were staying in Beadnell.
My first dormitory at Mowden Hall. Just four boys and a junior prefect. A homely scale. Small enough for whispered stories after lights out, safe enough to imagine it could be home. Later I was herded into the far larger dorms — twenty beds lined like a barracks — and whatever snugness had been there was lost.
When my mother sold our family home and moved into a Georgian terrace in the high street, the snug was literal. A small room, tucked between dining room and kitchen, with a television, a couple of sofas and a bean bag. That’s where we preferred to be, crammed in, rather than in the formal sitting room kept pristine for guests and Christmas.
Was snug a 1970s thing? It felt like every house had one — new builds as well as old. Sometimes it was fake-modern, James Bondish: a sunken lounge with shag pile and a drinks cabinet.
A girl I developed a crush on lived in a house with four snugs, and we used three of them when we wanted to be alone: her father’s snug off the kitchen, the TV snug tucked beside the sitting room, the sunroom down the garden, and our favourite, the attic snug. The attic was off-limits to parents, up steep steps, den-like, conspiratorial.
Even in castles, I found my snug. Appleby, for all its draughty vastness, had favoured rooms in the towers. The apartment at the top of the west tower was the best: panoramic views up the Eden Valley to the Pennines, sunlight spilling through 16th century stone cut windows onto the Turkish carpets .It was always bright, like being in a lighthouse I suppose, and somehow naturally warm. A snug in the sky.
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