One morning in the office, it rather messed up my concentration. With thoughts of a life that involved wind on your face and seaspray and dropping out whilst still having a very successful life. (Why is that then dropping out?)
Around the time he decided to 'drop out' of 'reality', someone said to him that the people who are always looking out of windows aren't happy indoors. It's a surprisingly obvious distinction I've never made - some people are fine wherever they are, some people need the arrangement to be right so they can feel comfortable (the feng shui as it were), whilst others (me included) will always try and be able to look out of a window. It's actually fairly central to my experience of being indoors - and the thing I don't like about being stuck in the middle of a large open plan office. And the thing I hated about working in a basement. And the thing that made me the difficult one who asked to swap desks in my current office.
I remember whilst working at the top of the ITV tower on the Southbank, doing my washing up on the other side of the building so I could watch that waterloo sunset. And not understanding how the others could manage not to look.
In New York, as he says, you forget you're on an island. You can go so long without seeing the water.
And the lack of parks compared to London made me claustrophobic and left me almost gasping for greengrass and open air.
Yet I still love the city. With it's opportunity and surprise.
Maybe this is residue of a conflict that started when I went from spending the first most formative 5 years of my life in a city, to moving to the countryside at almost the precise point my memories really begin.
Or maybe it began when we first decided to build brick walls that were permanent.
Either way, all this looking out of windows has got me thinking about what actually is to stop me from making that strangely radical leap to the outdoors.
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