It was quite something.
After a sleepless night in our new flat it seemed the thing to do.
I stood at the windows of our east-facing living room seven storeys up. Everywhere the sky was that clear blue-grey, the last stars had blinked out and the dawn chorus had quietened.
It was obvious where the sun would emerge - one patch of the horizon a dusky purple turning pink, orange, brighter and brighter - and then a flash of gold between chimney stacks, just a peek at first, but as soon as it appeared the whitewashed walls of the room turned rosey and I could see my faint shadow.
It always seems that the sun speeds up when it rises and sets. The rest of the time we barely notice its progress across the sky. As I watched, beams tentatively fingered their way across the rooftops rendering all into silhouette and suddenly, wrenched free of the horizon, it blazed and it hurt to keep looking.
Such a scene! If only I could paint!
The nights of course hold a different wonder. Anyone glancing upwards can't fail to notice the triangular conjunction of our moon and the planets Venus and Jupiter in western skies.
I wonder how this unusual, stunning, happy circumstance of orbits - all science, gravity and physics - would have been received long ago when people turned to the heavens for portents or omens.
What would they have read into this spectacle that so dominates the sky and generates wonder now even in those who have previously taken little interest in things astronomical?
You know I always loved gazing skyward, have always taken comfort from the great wheeling heavens, the vastness of space a reminder of our utter insignificance, of the miracle that we are here at all. Even more so now, I think, since you left. That old saying, we are all made of star dust...not just some romantic phrase to me any more.
And so I spent yesterday evening, restlessly hopping from the living room where Mars rose in the east, all pinky hues, to the back bedrooms where through one window Orion stalked the skies, its angry red giant star betelgeuse glittering while, through the other, Luna, Venus and Jupiter hung low, odd, almost unnatural decorations, before dipping beneath the horizon once more.
That's the fun of a new place...working out where everything goes, not just on the inside, but outside too. Perhaps little wonder sleep wouldn't come.
After the sunrise, and a glorious day beckoning, trying for shut-eye seemed pointless - so I sit here on the terrace, watching and listening.
I can hear a chiff-chaff - a true sign that spring has arrived. Also a great tit (they seem to have a different song here - instead of 'tea-cher, tea-cher' they go 'tea-cher-cher, tea-cher-cher - collard doves and wood pigeons, a dunnock. And joy, a blackbird.
I can't see waterbirds but I can hear geese honking like they do, from the nearby Ixelles ponds and two ducks fly overhead.
The parakeets are, as yet, quiet. Late risers perhaps. My enchantment with these new, bright flashy red-beaked creatures has turned to irritation of late - their harsh shrieks drowning the gentler notes of the native songbirds.
There are crows here too, strutting the roof tiles and I'm struck by the glossy creature perched on the roof opposite whose caw is exactly the same as a mallard! It's doing it again! 'Quaack quaack' - it sounds a bit camp, a bit foolish, and I'm thinking he needs to gruff up a bit if he wants to attract a mate.
Some birds are such impressionists and he reminds me of the starling who thought he was a curlew, who fooled us for so long with his burbling, bubbling spiralling call; who had us scouring the fields near our Hipperholme house with binoculars until we saw it on our roof, giving an exact impression, there in suburbia, of a bird of the wide marshes, the salty shores, the desolate moors.
It's not all birdsong here though. There is, of course, the constant background roar of the traffic and the sirens - always the sirens. And the planes weaving contrails across the sky always heading right to left, right to left, parallel to the rooftop horizon. Tiny, slow moving, like toys.
But at least here, in our new pad, I can hear the birds and from this terrace I see trees and green parks and blossom and buds and forsythia and magnolia.
And I can see the stars at night and, best of all, I can watch the sun rise from our living room.
I'll be window-hopping again tonight, never, never able to get enough of the wonders of our skies...
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