I pull back the curtain and I see the ruled-out Venetian blind. Blurred white lines. The light gets in, but not much else. A sliver of damp drive, a laurel leaf or two. There’s nothing much to see, really.
Never mind the curtains. What about the blinds? I love being the first one in the office. Last night the sun will have sunk low enough to shine directly into the eyes of my colleagues who linger until six or seven, and they will have shut the blinds.
When I raise the blinds the next morning the light washes in, and I, four floors up, have the trees at my feet. Resilient London planes, stolidly breathing in all the foul fumes of the Euston Road, spread a lush green carpet out before me. A church spire rises from the mass of leaves as if it were a freestanding pyramid.
I look across to the other office blocks (nobody there, yet), down on the roofs of the other buildings. Way down, below the trees, the buses line up in neat queues and swing around the corner each in turn. Buses aren’t just red, seen from up here. I see their white roofs and their fleet numbers writ large across them. Pedestrians swim in and out of the green canopy, some swift and purposeful, some trailing unwieldy suitcases behind them.
I was one of them, only a little while ago. Now I’ve gone inside, and climbed four flights of stairs, and pulled up the blinds, and have found myself in a different city.
Kathleen Jowitt 