My home ?

It will be... on the downs. Great, green rolling downs, with the rare wild outcrop of dark rock rearing up out of it. On the top of one of those hillocks, I will build a house. A mad house. A house of stone, of smooth blue-grey stone, with soaring ceilings and vast windows. It will need central heating, but it will not have it. It will have big, warm, downy blankets instead.

The rooms will continue the madness. One will be warm. Warm, with a dark, polished wood floor, and deep red and flame-coloured besides, and a fireplace with a chimney and everything. This room will have photographs. Three at most. Three large photographs of the people I would like to remember or think of. Comfortable armchair, sofa and a rug on the floor. A mattress in the corner you can flop tiredly down on.

The upstairs room will be dark green, like thoughtful fir woods, with light only coming from the small, gable window with a deep window-seat. A high bed, with slim bedposts from which sheer white curtains billow out like clouds, and white sheets. And a room leading off this one will be the library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books, books that I like, and that like me. And some that don't like me at all.

The main room - drawing-room-with-no-guests-to-come-spoil-it, will have vast windows of huge single pieces of glass, so that you forget they are there, and it seems that you are sitting on the downs themselves, and it will face west, so that all afternoon, the warm sun will filter in lazily and make comfortable the little spots where I like to curl up.

There will be a large and fancy kitchen- fancy not in trappings, but in state-of-the-art-ness, which will enable me to eat very well by cooking very little. Otherwise, it will be a cheerful sort of room. Yellow, perhaps, though not too yellow. I am not a yellow person.

And there will be one more room, aside from bathrooms and closet and similar necessary-but-not-really-to-be-noticed places. It will be very small. A small room, packed into the space left in space by the assortment of other rooms to ensure that the whole thing stands. A little room, with a slanting ceiling, and nothing in it at all. One fairly small, plain window. Nothing else. The floor, walls, everything will be of the same blue-grey stone outside. I might put in a mat to sit on in the winters. But nothing else.

There will be no road reaching directly to it. The road stops off a hillock away, and you can take a fairly convenient path, over that hillock and down through the dale and on a bit and there you are. Meanwhile, I won't have to hear the car-sounds because of the wind that will blow wildly about my house ineffectually trying to blow the anomaly away. Sitting inside you think you can hear the sea, the elements, angry at you, furious, but they cannot get inside.

Of course, sometimes I will wish that I had made it by the sea instead, and sometimes I will wish it had been in the mountains, and sometimes I will wish it had looked like those conventionally delightful looking little houses, with the tiled roofs and honeysuckle around the door, and so on and so on. But most of the time I will delight in it. And annoying people who are my closest neighbours will come and visit, thinking me lonely and odd and in need of normalising company, and I will be glad about that too, because it will be a delight such as never was to slam the door behind them when they leave. And them thinking it was just the nasty wind.