Opening windows

Windows are the things that stay between you and the outside world. Occasionally they shatter but most times they are just there.

After a long English winter, the temptation is to open them as soon as the sun shines. The idea is to let the warmth in.

(I used to work with someone called Bengt, who was Swedish. He told me that winter nights in Sweden are very very long and dark, and that the darkness lasts for months. The first time the sun shines in Spring, office workers all over the country abandon their desks. They can be seen on the streets, everywhere, turning their faces to the sky and soaking up its warmth.)

In England, when you open the windows - and the front door and the back door - the first time the sun shines after a long winter and the mornings are bright and blue-skied and it doesn't rain until four o'clock in the afternoon so you can get the washing dry if you're up early enough, one or more of the following things will happen:

- a cat will get in

- somebody will moan about how cold it is and wrap themselves in all the jumpers, duvets, gloves, hats and thermal underwear they couldn't possibly have worn when it was really cold and which, if they had when it was, could probably single-handedly have postponed global warming by at least 100 years

- you will think 'Ooo. I can send all these hair-brushings out of the bathroom window so that a passing bird can seize on them and recycle them cunningly into its nest'

- any hair-brushings sent out of the bathroom window will be blown back in

- the back door will crash shut every time you open the front so you'll have to use any conveniently placed draught-snake or pile of old newspapers to wedge them both open and prevent the kind of bang-type noise that will cause elderly neighbours to drop dead from heart attacks

- the cat that got in earlier will twine itself around your ankles and cause you to drop things

- you'll remember that you should have bought cat food when you were out and, because you didn't, the twining will go on until you do

- one or more of your children will creep up on you while you're sitting reading a book and minding your own business in the back garden and say 'For goodness sake, mother! ANYbody could have walked in!'

I like opening windows.

I've lived in hot countries where you only opened them at night, because night-time was the only time it was cool enough to let the air in. You could sit on the verandah after your children had gone to bed and watch the city's lights. Write love letters to someone you hadn't met yet, over and over again because the first one didn't quite say what you meant and you wanted to get it right. Buy a fountain pen because ballpoints are something you write shopping lists with and what you wanted to write was most definitely not a shopping list.