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Roof with a View
Or whatever there isn’t to learn watching the world go by
My roof in Oxford is my garden, or terrace, or whatever people use to be outside while still being on their property. The property, I should say, is not mine, but belongs to Christ Church College, where I sing in the Cathedral when I have a voice, which I haven’t had for over a month now. The roof is where I have spent some of this time, and it feels like time well spent, so well spent in fact that I can already see myself missing it terribly.
You know when you have those moments of true nostalgia, when you recognise how it felt to be in a certain time and place only by virtue of its now being remote? You, or at least I, can’t with any certainty forecast what I’ll feel nostalgic for — I’m almost always wrong — but I’m pretty sure I’m right in thinking that sitting on the roof at dusk as I watch man by woman by boys by girls by group by cyclists by part-time scooterists sail by is a pastime that will one day feel exceptionally and painfully precious. To some extent, it does already, and here’s why.
Firstly, I like a beer. I don’t drink too often, but everyone knows that a jar on the roof as the sun turns in is a different kind of cold one. A bit like in that scene in The Shawshank Redemption, when the convicts who also like beer sit and drink with the ‘sun on their…
