Apart from making one feel crazed if faced with a view of snow. Although that too is a problem. The picture window you look out from filled with a crisp clean white, with only the outlines of structures seen. Those shapes you know but covered in white against a pure white or dove-grey sky makes them instead of friendly inhospitable.
Yes, the sight of white does something to your brain and your naked eye, though I'm not sure what. Correction: my brain, my eye, because that's the only firm evidence I have to go on, sitting up here in my red and white block that's not constructed of brick but of who knows what – mortar and what? - and which therefore moves when washing machines and dishwashers are in use, when windows and doors are slammed and when a wind has turned island-wild: gusts only a small isle can experience and sometimes withstand. The floors bounce and vibrate, the ceiling shakes. The walls hums with the neighbours' activities. Framed pictures shift on their hammered-in hooks and partitions oscillate. Your own refrigerator thumps and clunks. The bathroom extractor clicks when you enter and exit. And somewhere there's an unidentifiable and intermittent beep.
But those are the internals, which living up, raised off the ground so you're more in the sky, sharing it with the birds that fly in it, does not really bear upon; it would be the same anywhere, in close quarters or even in converted properties and terraced housing. It has nothing to do with the number of floors, it's the build, though a documentary once enlightened me that a moving structure is better in an earthquake. So, it has that going for it at any rate, though the earth, as of yet in this small part of the world, does not quake, or if it does it's rarely reported and even rarely felt. Touch wood. I always touch my writing-dining, dining-writing table (I couldn't decide which activity should be mentioned first and which was more important: dining for energy or writing for sanity) in such instances though I'm not convinced it's helpful. I do so now. Ah, what's this! A new indent. How did that occur? And when did I last rotate the table and chairs?
Never mind. It's so easy to become distracted by domestic chores and forget there's an outside at all, excepting as I said when it's white, or so bright it's dazzling and the room in which I sit grows humid so that I feel like a plant mistakenly labelled as a hothouse variety when I'm longing for a gentle breeze to move the drapes and a refreshing drink, on tap. Make mine a Pina Colada. Because that's when from outside all I hear is clink-clink-clink. Glass on glass. And whoops of laughter, that tittered, screeched, whooped, inane and boastful. Look out and I see bared arms and legs and dresses that waft or show a lot off; from up here I have a whole new angle and it's not always pretty or forgiving. The wearers' flesh turning pinker like rashers of bacon as they crisp and not as they think like sausages browning. Neither is good, but the latter, I gather, is more desirable.
Pale English rose, or vampire if you like as I shun this 'Glorious Weather!', sweating indoors and pounding this here keyboard, occasionally halting to exclaim: 'Oh, do shut up!' in reference to the infernal chatter and boom boom boom of music. A very short pause to think ahead to the scrape of chairs on concrete when I may get a golden half hour of silence in which I won't write, properly, due to the hour, but will be able to collect my thoughts, perhaps even scribble them on a post-it and find they still make sense come morning.
And that's some hope, because they usually don't. But the satisfaction at the time, although it was fleeting, was there.
A flat for all seasons, then, from which to observe life and wonder about it and get riled up over. An eagle's nest, a high castle, an ivory tower, though as I've noted it's not that and never will be any of those because I'm nowhere near as high up as that – only three floors yet I make it sound more (and it feels more) since it separates one, and places you in the unenviable positions of either a boss-like figure watching his workforce from above or a prisoner removed from the situation, otherwise termed as normal living.
Picture credit: The Chair, 1975, Salvador Dali.
All posts published this year were penned during the last.
