Room With A View

Our house is near the top of one of the hills in Hemel and faces south out over the valley below. As I think I've said before, the house is actually a maisonette and covers the top two floors of a three storey building, along with three other similar places (the bottom floor has one bed flats in it). In front of the building, each flat has a short front garden beyond which there is a patch of open ground that extends all the to the road 40 yards away. On the other side of the road are normal, two storey houses.

Because the ground slopes away from our building, the houses opposite are considerably lower. So much so that from our living room on the first floor we can see clear over the top of them. From the bedrooms upstairs the view is even more spectacular because we can also see over the tops of the houses to the side, giving us close to a 180 degree view of the horizon.

We look out over the rooftops across the valley to the green and wooded slopes on the other side of the railway line, towards the village of Bovingdon. The only thing to mar the landscape is the A41 bypass that cuts through the hills but it doesn't spoil it too much.

One thing I noticed last week was that I was spending much more time staring out of the window than I had before, letting my mind drift. Even to the point of ignoring TV programmes I wanted to watch. Come the summer, with its light evenings, I'll probably ponder the view more than I do the television screen.