People watching is always a pleasure, but it’s particularly enjoyable done from the comfort of your own home, through your very own window
There’s a pleasant comfort in seeing the neighbours unpacking shopping, fetching in a parcel or weeding the front garden from your window-watching position. Nosy it may be (we’ll happily own that) but it also makes you feel part of a community. There goes Susan on her bike off to work. One gust and that packed lunch in her pannier will be gone… Isn’t that a new postie? Hope she sticks around until Christmas - she looks a sensible sort. What are those workmen digging up NOW? Surely there can’t be a square inch of tarmac they’ve not messed with this year…
And it’s not just people that are worth taking a seat at the window for. As well as seeing folk you recognise (and, much more interestingly, folk you don’t) a seat at the window might give you a glimpse of wildlife - whether a neighbourhood fox, inquisitive squirrel or flock of birds making their way back to warmer climes. A window onto wildlife is like a TV nature documentary that never stops.
Perhaps you’re a weather watcher, monitoring the approach of enough blue sky for a pair of sailor’s trousers. Or commenting that it’s ‘black over Bill’s mother’s’. Or maybe you simply like to cloud watch, seeing dragons and castles come and go.
Window watching is a way of marking the day. The keen joggers, off before breakfast, the school run parents hustling children and cardboard models of Stonehenge down the pavement, the older residents keen to get to the supermarket before the queues, the delivery van drivers, to-ing and fro-ing all day, the toddlers scooting back from playgroup, the dog-walkers off to the park, the evening commuters eager to get home again… All of life is out there, framed by your window, hour by hour.
As well as making you feel part of a community, a window view takes you out of your small world and into the world of others, literally broadening your horizons.
And if your view doesn’t offer quite enough for you, the magic of technology means you can always visit someone else’s. You could lose hours on WindowSwap (https://www.window-swap.com/Window), clicking ‘open a window somewhere in the world’ and looking through a window in Cambodia, St Petersburg, Montreal, Melbourne… And you can share your own window view there, too. We warn you - it’s dreadfully addictive for window-watchers.
Why not pull back the curtain right now, see what your view is, and make another link with the world?
In our July ‘Fruit’ issue, our ‘My Place’ pages are all about rooms with a view, and we’ve picked out some beautiful windows for you to gaze out of, including the sea view above by Zia Mattocks. The issue is in shops now.
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