I'm currently house-hunting. I'll blog about this at length another time but having just walked to the local Editor - the newsagent's answer to a creeping fungus smothering the city - to pick up snacks for the office, I've found an odd change to how I look at the world.

I usually see buildings as fronts - individual walls closing off my environment, like a simplistically modelled videogame. Glorified walls, marking the permimeter of my context.

As I walked the hundred yards to the shop I became painfully aware of buildings as *boxes*, with the idea implicit that they're full of *things* and *stuff* and *space*, and there's a whole world I could buy into.

I'm looking through the city with the eyes of a real-estate man. It is, at least, a change.

(This isn't completely true - almost every weekend I find myself walking, looking at the fascades and wondering what acts of sexual depravity those bricks conceal. But even then, I'm not viewing the walls as sides of a container - I'm considering them as a Theatre's curtain which refuses to raise and reveal the show.)

Meanwhile, an e-mail has just asked "Were you Ted Bundy in another life?", so I better get back to work.