A fellow blogger and Think Sideways student, Tanja, posted a photograph that got me thinking.
It’s a photo of the view from her living room.
Tanja loves the view from her living room, and I can understand why. But I think we probably love it for different reasons. To me, living in Australia, the view is exotic and ‘other’ – the buildings shoulder to shoulder, the white framed many-paned windows, the spires, turrets and domes of the background, the green moss-tint on the black slate roofs… nearly everything in her view is unfamiliar and interesting to me.
The other thing that speaks to me about this picture is the sense of a secret place. I love the spaces between and behind buildings. The spaces beneath cities, the places you might not even know about it even if you’d lived in the city for fifty years. I love the whole concept of urban exploration.
The view from my living room is both familiar and other. I lived in Perth, Western Australia, for most of my life. Ten years ago I moved to Canberra, from a coastal plain to an inland mountain region. I miss the ocean, but I wouldn’t give up the mountains to have it back.
You can just see the dark line of the mountains in the distance. No snow on them this year though 
