Here and There: from my window

This is the view from the living room window at the front of the house. Mostly you can see my privet hedge, which is original to the house and been growing there since the 1930s or so. I keep it fairly high because it stops people walking past from looking in the front window. The houses opposite are quite close, the road is very narrow, I have seen those lovely wide streets on American films! The cars you can just see are parked in the front gardens, many people make their front garden into off-street parking as it's difficult to park here. The Prof often has to park right down the street, or even in the next.

This was taken from the side window at the top of our stairs. It's rubbish day today, so you can see there are some bins in the street. Children play on the green there, the sign on the right says 'No ball games', though I have spent many summer afternoons having a football repeatedly thump the side of my house. 
The branches you can just see at the bottom of the picture are the pyracantha which grows up my side fence and badly needs cutting back a bit! Not going to happen in this cold weather.

Ours is a little house with a little garden. The end of the garden you can see, about two feet beyond the blue pot. This is taken from my back step - I would have taken it through the window of the back door but the awful truth is that the glass is too dirty. From the back step to the end of the garden is about fifteen paces, and the garden is triangular. I know over there you call your gardens yards, well here it's a garden if it's grass and a yard if it's concrete so really mine's a yard, I just refuse to call it one. At the moment it's all quite barren out here, in the spring and summer  the Virginia creeper on the left fence is lovely, though every year just to be awkward it sheds all its leaves before they turn properly red. Most years I do my best in the summer to make it look and feel more like a garden, with pots of flowers. This year was so busy, I didn't do it but I have high hopes for next year. I painted my bench this year, it needs redoing because it got rained on before it was dry and the paint got all pitted, so there's a job for the spring.


I'm glad at least the sun was shining for my little urban photographs. Tomorrow you are going to make me jealous with your pictures of the grass and trees surrounding your house.