Adding on

At one time we thought of adding a patio outside what is now our bedroom. (It started off as the girls’ bedroom, became a dining room for a time when they’d grown up, and then reverted to its normal state again.) But we could never agree on the idea. I didn’t fancy having French windows straight into my bedroom, even if I could have stepped out onto the equivalent of a patio garden first thing on a fresh, sunny morning (a patio garden, that is, if we’d put flowers around it).

If it had been left up to my wife, she would have taken the opportunity one weekend when I wasn’t around, and would have knocked the window out, and some of the wall, and left us with no choice but to do something. (She did this with a door once.) Fortunately, she restrained herself on this occasion, and we continue to sleep in a room that has its original windows.

But every so often, she harks back to the idea of ‘something’ outside the window, whether it’s our window or the window upstairs – where ‘we could build a balcony!’

The photo above comes from The Old Vicarage, Treneglos, near Launceston, in Cornwall.