[More old stuff]

Seville is a city that lives its public theatre in three dimensions. The actors who wander the cobbled stage below are observed, appraised and roundly criticised from up in the rickety front-row of the circle – the balconies and terraces that are so much a part of living here.

In my first year in the city, I was forever straining to see what was happening up there where unseen deities dispensed contemptuous judgement and scattered pipa manna. Seven flights above our flat was a locked glass door through which, when breath and vision had returned on an oven of a day, a bare concrete expanse could just be discerned, eternally out of reach. Friends were luckier, with smart modern balconies or, in bigger blocks, the rippling deck of a communal space, rigged with washing lines and bedsheets and commanded by a grizzled captain. Luckier still were those who had somehow wangled a ticket marked ‘terrace’ in the rental lottery.

But luck can change; next turn of the tombola and I have my own terrace, and can now swing my gaze slightly hesitantly around the rooftops. So, how do the gods live?
Lazily, mostly. On furniture of ancient melamine or wooden wrecks banished from rooms open to the bombona man. Or hammocks, strung from rust. Some of the smarter houses down the way hide pools, beer fridges and matching furniture behind the striped canopies but, at an early dusk, I look out mostly at aerials groping the sky for tarot readings and gameshows, at crumbling brickwork behind façades of whitewashed plaster, and at gutters grown shaggy over summer. It’s a jerry-built paradise, unplanned, with bolt-on rooms, railings, and spilling vegetation, neglected cacti, architectural porcelain, and ledges – some colonised by pigeons, some patrolled by cats nimble on ceramic and disdainful of deeds and tenancies.

Up here, residents stare at one another in the blank curiosity of a strangely public space. Within days of arrival, I was staring back, curtain twitching without curtains, but with a feeling of frank entitlement in taking whatever entertainment is on offer: the comings and goings of the family across the way; the fug and dubby rhythm of the house with the rainbow flag; the progress of the mismatched lovers among the laundry across the ravine; and, on one or two occasions, a neighbourly argument, at customary volume.

There’s a shared life on the rooftops, and sometimes an odd disconnection from the geography below. In the muddle of houses stacked like shoeboxes after a warehouse flood, it’s hard to trace down to street-level the old man who winches his canopy backwards and forwards, three rooftops over; but I’m glad he winches, marking the tempo of day and night, from sunrise over the church to the moment the sun sets behind next door’s gable.

As winter comes, the gods head inside, leaving their Olympian residue. I count six Betis flags to one tattered Sevilla, a dozen litronas, three broken chairs, a couple of shipwrecked washing racks and a watermarked canopy. And, here and there, amongst the cigarette butts and spilled drinks, cockroaches, creeping in from the dereliction over the wall.

[I don't have a terrace anymore. So it goes]