I’ve become slightly obsessed with the view from my bathroom window. It’s a glimpse of a tower block that sits behind a tree and is beyond the roofline of Norlington School for Boys that dominates the vista. The window itself is not a grand affair, it’s the small one at the top of the frame, but it’s head high and everytime I go into the bathroom my eyes become drawn to this horizon then lock onto the tower. It started off as merely an intriguing sight, but has since gained a greater hold over me. Now I feel that it is trying to communicate with me, calling out, transmitting a signal that so far I can’t unscramble. When I had to get up in the middle of the night to comfort one of the children it appeared there as a strip of light, the illuminated stairwell, suddenly I didn’t mind so much being woken at 3am.

I have so far resisted the temptation to visit it up close for fear of disappointment. I would like it to remain as a slightly unfixed, unreal location, a floating tower, a bit like the ships that I used to watch sail across the horizon at night from my bedroom in Collaroy, Sydney. There is every chance, that up close, I wouldn’t recognise it that it would continue to appear as a point in the distance.

It is only recently that I realised that this tower could be a manifestation of the one in John Smith’s classic film ‘The Black Tower’. That film had infiltrated my consciousness years before I moved out here, half a mile from Smith’s house and the location of the film. Maybe it drew me east from Islington. Called me over from the high ground of Penton Mound to a similarly elevated part of London. Maybe I should make a film as Smith did in order to understand my relationship with this mystical object. Although I think I’ll just keep gazing at it from the bathroom window for now.