When I pull up the wooden blinds, careful to support them in the middle so the tug on the three right-handed strings doesn’t pull them off the wall above the window (as has happened several times before), the sun has not yet risen above the railway tracks. The colours of the sky are undecided – a plain blue but also some spilled coffee, some raw eggwhite, all on a pewter platter. Thin diagonal outreaching branches of ash trees form a delicate fabric of silhouettes – joining where they cross, because they are so perfectly black. Two trains have gone by since I started writing this, just above eye level, green trim and passengers seated facing one another in yellowish oblongs. Some of them are commuting away from the City of London. I’m sitting in my black armchair, a little architecture all its own, but comfortable, facing away from them and towards the desk. I’m writing this because I feel yesterday got too far away from where I am, although it was about where I am (in terms of money, being; society, philosophy). Since the subsidence works, the walls of my writing room are a warm green. I love the colour but I’m not sure it’s exactly what I wanted – it may be better. The paints I could choose, seen on my computer screen, were all from the Dulux catalogue; that’s what the insurance company allowed us. This green is forthright, height of spring, not unorganic but Devon when it becomes hyperreal rather than Dorset on a Tuesday. I imagined something with more death and decay in it, some haze of history. I’m assuming it will start to face towards that. No repainting it now, and when the lights are off, and the streetlamps on the main road broadcast through the ash trees, and are warped into islands and archipelagos by the windowpanes, my walls are gorgeous.
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