A Dining Room with a View

The view from the first-floor workplace dining room window, is large. Mostly sky. Nearly always grey with cloud filling the vast expanse of glass.

But the effect is spacious, endless, upwards. It is north-facing, out the back of a building purposefully designed to house the supermarket where I work, a doctors’ surgery above and a few flats adjacent to that. The carpark is underground.

    As I stir my tea or prepare my tray for lunch, I find myself at the window. No tables are sited to look upon the outside, the windows are placed too high for that. You have to be standing to take in any more than the sky.

    I am drawn to the window. My eyes fixate. My breathing relaxes. I remember who I really am. I am reminded of the bigger world. Sounds from the shop floor recede as I put my ear-piece along with my handset onto a table with my book, my glasses, my phone, my lunch. I pour the milk into my tea as I stand by the bins lined up below the window, ready to dispose of the teabag into the one labelled, ‘food stuffs ONLY’. It took a while for the dining room partner to train us all: recyclables, non-recyclables and food, ONLY.

    The view from a standing position is determinedly suburban, the houses, the rooftops, dictate that much. However, in my mind’s eye I segregate the areas and surmise that most of the view, barring the aforementioned sky, is, in fact, trees. Those in the fore and mid-ground would have been planted around the same time the houses were built, perhaps thirty or forty years ago, I guess. These trees are magnificent, still youngsters, not yet elders, but hearty, bold, fulsome. The leaf colour displays a range of greens, silver and maroon; the wind ruffles them, tickling them to show their undersides and thereby exposing an even greater range of tone. But they never seem fully liberated by the wind, as though their neighbourliness demands a certain behaviour: not to grow too big or wilful, not to demonstrate or flex their personalities, not to stand out from the crowd. I expect the residents are grateful for the greenery however, I expect they value the seasonal barometers that line their roads, that accumulate in the grassy areas, that peek from around the brick and concrete corners. And from my elevated view from the first-floor window, I too am grateful for the softening of hard lines and sharp edges, for the billowing roundedness that renders the lego-brick blockwork of the buildings, and the cars parked in chains as if to bolster the kerbs, palatable by contrast.

    The houses are unimaginative in their design, repetitive in their spacing and presence, dull in colour and bland in texture. Four walls and rooves all of the same degree of slant, monotonous. No architect here was allowed to let loose their wild ideas and visions, no platform given at any meeting to push at the boundaries of budgetary restraints, to argue the cause for passion and feeling in the soon-to-be homes of many, many people. Instead: planned by committee, designed by stipulation, compromised by funding. Built, finally, and boxes ticked, boxes indeed, made into houses.

    So, my gaze skims over the rooves (someone’s handset in the dining room pings the Deliveroo alert, the two or three of us up here are flustered like Pavlov’s dog for a second) until my attention is caught by a figure walking the desire line diagonally across the public open space directly behind the supermarket; he will disappear soon beneath the angle of the building. My eye is drawn to a small, round, white dog, preceding its owner, pulling at the end of a long extendable leash. The owner shuffles in to view, their backs to me, owner and dog cross ways with the solitary figure. It is a dance, choreographed out of habit and the daily humdrum of little compulsions and concessions. The trees play their part. They urge to have a voice. The buildings stand nonchalant (conversation behind me, a laugh, the satisfying chlunk of the microwave door being closed, its whirr, the anticipation of another ping, a different pitch).

    I flick my teabag into the bin at last and glance over my shoulder at my work-fellows. Lifting my mug to my lips I lift my eyes to the sky once more. From the shimmer in the tree-tops I see the wind has picked up. An obligatory crisp-packet, or some such, flits across the grass where the dog had trailed. Perked up by a gust, the discarded piece of flotsam hops, then morosely settles amongst the tufts and dandelions. Another municipal cut, before autumn fully sets in?

    Something glides into sight surprisingly close to eye level; I turn my gaze to meet it. Another eye, a pale grey iris ringed in bright yellow; a herring gull, a passenger on the wind. Its impossible white is pristine clean and porcelain smooth. Does the bird look directly at me? Impulsively it tips into resolve and slides away; a graceful intention of the wings and off it goes (there is the microwave bell! And the scrape of china plate across the glass oven-tray) but my eyes don’t leave the bird until it disappears up and off over the roof above me.

    (A clatter of cutlery, the movements of sitting down to a meal, the exhalation of shop-floor stress being shed. A conversation: one-sided between a partner and their headpiece, another, between two partners by the vending machine, “how does this work now? A new system and they always come with teething problems …”) Over there, right over there as far away as you can see, in-between an undulation of trees, is a tiny bit of staccato horizon. At last, this is where I rest, this is where I always go. During these precious snatched moments. I seek those three tiny, inverted, adjacent triangles of blue-grey far-distance, nestled behind the more solid mid-view. They hide without self-consciousness, they just are. They are shapes of pure dreaming and unbelonging. I seek them to escape and to remind me of who I am; over there is where I can breathe.

    I stand at the interface, the in-between. A world of solid matter, of objects and commerce behind me, a means to support my means; the companionship and comradery of partners together facing an everlasting cavalcade of tasks that keep the wheels rolling. It is infallible and incontrovertible; it is a machine.

    But the blue-grey ephemera of possibility lies over there and that is what makes the mechanism tolerable, palatable, enjoyable even: if I can remind myself of who I really am, if I can see the thing I actually identify with, if I can recognise myself and remain ignited with a glimpse of dreaming. I stand at the dining room window, with a foot placed within the view.