Windows

 

I'm pretty certain that I'd recognize this as an English city window anywhere - pick it out of a window identity parade - but why?   The turn of the C19th/C20th brick, certainly; that particular way that the whitish ledge is crumbing; the net curtain - extra privacy granted by the rippled glass in the front pane, too; the plastic flowers; the general knick-knacks - and the fact that all of this is very visible right on the street, with just eighteen inches or so of private yard before a low, decrepit brick wall.   I'm not sure that this catalogue fully answers the question of national identity, though - unless the coupling with dull grey light helps, and the sense that plenty of slow rain has seeped into all the brickwork over the years.   It's in Tabor Grove, Wimbledon - on the way to the station - the kind of window that one walks past for years, for decades, without ever really noticing.

For of course, this is the kind of window display that one's meant to notice

- one more haughty mannequin to add to my roster, in Miu Miu on Sloane Street -

or this

one Tiffany diamond pendant, set off by mirrors, a Victorian church, and a Braque like fragment of me taking a photograph, just as one turns into Sloane Square.