It’s usually a vacation thing. You go to Florence (duh), Siena, Athens, Paris, Salzburg, wherever, and you hope, pray, pay for a view. There’s something about that elusive, exclusive view (as Forster and Merchant-Ivory so pointedly showed us) that makes the time special, that makes you feel life is smiling upon you, that you are absolutely where you were meant to be in that moment. That something magical might happen, because a few Renaissance architects conspired to leave before your eyes a harmony, a serenity, a perfect proportion that your everyday life has always denied you.

In my first job in San Francisco I was in an office tower with a splendid view over the Bay, Alcatraz, Treasure Island…I was the only one working there who did not have a view. I looked onto the heavy wooden front door, and the telephone. I had no window. This lack of view was a badge of my lowly status.

Other jobs, other apartments had better prospects, but never a real View. Some greenery; a lively street; the Acropolis if I turned my head 90 degrees and brought out some binoculars; a yacht harbour full of other yachts and an upward prospect onto a lovely hillside full of rich people in villas; a garden with roses and ferns and gardenias.

As a tourist, I had a view in Siena. My room was the size of a kitchen pantry; I had booked two nights, and on the first day a little kid running across the street with his gelato tripped me up, I fell, and by midnight had an ankle the size of a grapefruit. Fortunately a colleague had given me some dangerously strong pain killers, and the next morning I threw my window open on this:

I felt better, my ankle didn’t hurt at all. The town was mine to discover. By possessing that view, I possessed my experience of the place. And if I had not been able to walk, I would have told the Signora I wanted to stay an extra day, with the windows thrown open onto the view. (Oddly enough, seeing this photograph again today, I realize it is not at all how I remember the view, that I had fabricated in my memory something more vast, more evocative of a distant era, with a church on a hilltop (!) but also, alas, an intrusive crane repairing something…)

The first time I went to Athens I had a view on the Acropolis; but Athens being Athens, the view was less glorious, less green, than Siena. I had a magnificent view the first time I was in Venice, but that was 1974; never again, I was priced right out of the view market. I had a splendid view for an entire summer on the island of Samos, onto the harbour of a small fishing village; but in those days, Greek islands didn’t yet rate as Views like Italy or France. (It seems the more frequented a place, the higher the status of the view.) I don’t recall any views in England or Scotland; Ireland, perhaps. Lots of rainbows.

But now…now I feel like I ought to belong to an Alcoholics Anonymous for views. I am inebriated with my view. Intoxicated, drunk, borracha, methismeni. And like any self-respecting lush, also somewhat embarrassed. Friends come to visit, say things like, I don’t believe it, or, you live here? Here? And I apologize and say, really, I’ve been on the wagon for a week, I only look out the bathroom window onto the next door neighbors’ little boy’s football net. Really, it’s enough.

So when I’m sober I sit and listen to Erik Satie and look onto this view shared over time by Nabokov, Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky (and no doubt their less glorious and more venal 21st century countrymen), not to mention all the non-Russian celebrities who have trooped through this region and its generous views over time, from Audrey Hepburn to Charlie Chaplin to Richard Burton and David Bowie, etc etc…

Some people get rich, others get famous, sometimes the two go together but as a rule to get a view you have either to a) be rich b) have been born in the place as a local aristocrat or peasant (middle class people don’t inherit views) c) look like Helena Bonham-Carter. I can claim none of those things; I am not rich or famous or notorious, only mildly successful in my profession as a translator (and we all know they live in freezing garrets); I did not marry well, I am not and have never been what passes for beautiful in the pages of our stupid women’s magazines, therefore I could certainly not play the sort of roles required to be Helena Bonham-Carter…

but

in the view lottery, I won the jackpot. Or the soul of E. M. Forster told someone upstairs that it was my turn. Whether it will last for a year or a lifetime, peu importe. I have a view, and it is a big responsibility, believe me. Beyond learning different ways to formulate, “I apologize in advance for my View,” I’ve tried to make it more tatty and realistic by mentally pleading with the neighbours to buy a third car, maybe a horrid SUV to remind me of my neighbours in California, but no dice. Even with their two fairly old ordinary cars they don’t manage to spoil the view; they just keep it from being perfect, so I can deal with it. The rest is perfect, always, incredibly; the mountains are always high, snow and cloud-draped; Evian and Thonon are always twinklingly French in the evening distance; the steamboats plying the lake are always white and nostalgic and graceful; the sailboats are best of all, sailing nowhere in particular, just enjoying being where they are, feeling the blessing of wind and sunlight, suspended in a natural landscape as magnificent as any on our small planet.

But don’t think for a minute it’s postcard predictable or boring. Because there is weather, here, real weather, not that fog stuff that used to try to masquerade as a winter tempest in San Francisco, or that bleaching white California sun, or even that deep blue blazingly hot Greek wind-blasted summer. Here you have clouds, rain, fog, wind, thunder and all that good meteorological stuff that people without Views complain about, but I love it because it gives me my daily soap opera,: what will the lake be up to? Will Thonon be visible? Will the tourists on the Général Guisan be feeling green by now? Shouldn’t those kayakers find refuge? Will the golden light hit the mountains down by the other end of the lake?

What did I do to get this view? Nothing, just hope. And have a fairy godmother as a family member, sheer fate. And I agreed with myself to forfeit a staircase for a companionway, as if I were on one of those boats on the lake… And to opt to live in a village rather than a town, and walk, and take the train. But even then, it doesn’t explain it all…I do know, after two months of learning to live with my view, that this is the way we should all be living. That all our gadgets and devices, all our financial or professional or political pursuits become meaningless in the presence of such splendour. It’s almost religious. It has something to do with the soul, but I’ll need some time to figure that out too; I need to go through the seasons, to see the vineyard wither and die, then come back to life; to feel the cold and damp lifting off the view and into my days; to feel the return of the sun and the promise the view can offer, daily. I think it’s about life. And something timeless–despite being in clock country.

Oh, and there are swans, too. And ducks. And even the odd water-skier, just in case I thought I had managed to leave the century behind.