Our new flat is starting to feel like home, but until this morning, we had a cable running from our bedroom window, out and across the living room and into the study for the internet connection. Today it had to go. I asked the landlord to show me how to access the roof and he took me to one of the attic flats with no complaints from the tenants and pointed to a panel in the ceiling. I shifted aside the bit of plywood and climbed up, wondering at what happens when it rains. If the girls from the flat bothered to look up my gho, I didn’t care.
The roof was all corrugated iron and looked quite slippery so I stuck to the reinforced ridge on the crawl to the antenna. I found it (by following the cable) sacriligiously attached to a prayer flag, tied on with the cable and quickly pulled up the cable to drop over the correct side of the building. Then I stood up and, supported by the prayer flag, surveyed the scenery. Mountains in every direction and corrugated iron roofs tumbling into the valley below me. The scenery looked back. I guess I looked somewhere between Sir Edmund Hillary and a christmas tree, so it’s not surprising that everyone in the buildings and streets around stopped to look up at the crazy chilip.