We all have our favourite views – probably lots of them. One of mine is along our little narrow London gardens, from the breakfast table in the kitchen. Favourite perhaps because I can not only name each plant, remember where we got it, and in some cases the number of its flower buds. The pink camellia on the right currently has forty-four, beginning to open. Its name is Top Hat: I didn’t plant it and wouldn’t. Cold things, camellias; soft and sexy, but scentless, and scent is the soul of a flower.
My favourite nighttime view is from an upper window of a cottage at Keyhaven on the Solent, looking at the Isle of Wight over the wide salt marshes, sheltered from wind and tide by the long narrow Hurst Spit, the shingle bank that protects the Solent from the west. Its tip, Hurst Castle, is only a mile from the Isle of Wight. The night view takes in the lighthouse by the castle, a slow intermittent white light, and off in the right distance the blinking red light on the Needles. Their syncopated flashes become hypnotic – and I in my pyjamas.
