22nd March 1995 3.30pm

I wish you could be here now. This is such a perfect moment. I'm sitting at my desk which is pushed up against the wall under an open sash window. The cream curtains are open and there's a stream of white muslin which is pulled across to one side at the bottom and spills down onto the floor around my feet. Just outside the window is a red berry tree, a bit messy, too many branches and twigs, no leaves, but hundreds of bunches of hard, neat little red berries. Stone Temple Pilots on the CD, a little cool breeze occasionally. The sky is pale blue and even a warm milky weak sun over to the right. There's a lot of brown and green and yellow. Lots of trees, grass and bushes. Two big dark, dark holly trees. A row of poplars, I think, very tall straight pointing upwards trees. My berry tree. A silver something. Ash? White bark and a fibrey, ganglionic mess of twigs.


There's a cobbled street, which is my road, and a main tarmacked road running across the end of it. Three big houses, twenty or thirty rooms in each I would say. One has a huge circular conservatory on the side, full of wicker chairs and tables and dark red rugs on the stone floor. Another is side on to me and has a painted white wall around it and there's a big stairway visible inside and large white painted pots of bushes against the side of the house. The other 'house' has a sign outside it "8 Luxury Apartments" and is dark orange red brick and is called Holly Grange and has black balconies at the windows on the top floor.


Next to that are three very solid, expensive 'workman's cottages', grey and stony with slate roofs and long thin gardens. The there are four tall white Georgian houses, Olive Grove, one has a glossy blue front door. There's just enough people and cars to keep me interested. I can just hear some bits of their conversations. It's lovely. There's a fair bit of twittering and chirping going on, a chaffinch in my tree, two magpies on the lawn - two for joy - usually quite a few squirrels, but not today.


There's a park on the other side of this house, with statues and a bandstand, a bowling green, a sand pit, an aviary, and the house of the old man who kept trying to kiss me and his son who raped me when I was nine backs onto it. I can't see those things, but I know they're there. And I can smell the smoke from a bonfire.