Long before children, when Phil and I were newly acquainted, we used to haunt a vast surfing beach on the North Coast of Cornwall.

It had everything one could wish for in a surfing beach: acres of golden sands, a cliff from which to view the action, and beatnik-staffed wetsuit emporiums lining the village approach road.

We favoured out-of-season short breaks. Which meant, of course, that for much of our time down there, especially at this time of year, it was pitch black and one couldn’t see the hand in front of one’s face, let alone the wave on which one was meant to launch oneself with hippie abandon.

We stayed in a pub and hotel which perched up on the cliff. It had a huge panorama window: a great semicircular vantage spot. You could get in the round of pints, and the scampi and chips, secure a bottle of ketchup and sit down to watch the world go by.

Except that it was usually winter, and one could not see a thing out of the window. Even the faint ghostly shadows of white horses on the crest of each wave did not have a fighting chance, when pitted against the lighting of questionable taste behind us, and the reflections of all the fruit machines opposite.

But sitting there, in the dead of winter, gazing out at who knows what, and the subject of who knew whose scrutiny, we were very happy. We felt so close to it all, next to those panes of glass which only barely separated us from the Atlantic ocean.

That window tugged at my memory this evening, as the dog and I ambled on a jet-black walk.

We live cheek to jowl, here in The Shire, here on this island where space is at a premium. Our house is part of a cheeky avant-garde Swedish development in the middle of unassuming Everytown. Labyrinthine as hobbit holes and tall as Ents, the houses link arm in arm to form circles round three gracious communal gardens.

Macaulay the dog, with his bushy low brows, is far too low-brow to be seen in one of these upwardly mobile spaces in daylight. But as dark falls, we put on the lead and shuffle surreptitiously out to take a gander at developments in the past 24 hours.

Because while the front of the houses is as blank as Bilbo’s solid round door, the backs, with the garden aspect, are a veritable gallery of windows.

There is something about walking past the glass which forms the boundary to someone else’s living space. Each person has made their home different, each individual: but much more importantly, each is a scene from a life, a magic lantern which glitters.

My favourite window is a beautiful kitchen which looks onto the immaculate green lawn. At night it is white with red accents, and the most glorious collection of stainless steel pots and pans hangs from a saucepan rack running the length of the window.  The scene positively gleams.

They say grass is always greener on the other side of the fence: perhaps, in the same vein, life is always more vivid on the other side of the window.

I don’t think many have put it better than Kenneth Graham. I read a scene from Wind in The Willows when I was young and it has always stayed with me: Mole smells home one day, and feels compelled to return home. Just before that first sniff, Graham shows us a village through the little animal’s eyes, as they travel through the dark December night.

He writes: “Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture–the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation.

“Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.”

Graham used Mole to give form to that nameless homing instinct we have here on the island, in the darkest month of the year. These windows beckon, not to themselves, but serve as a compelling signpost to our own homes, and the little theatres which are our lives.

I have a favourite moment in a favourite film. Gregory’s Girl is a Scottish classic, a coming-of-age film set in a Scottish new town. New towns, like my own, were built from scratch to house city dwellers who moved out to a new life in the country. They are prosaic, sometimes unbeautiful places. Mine certainly is. But I grew up here, and its architectural language is home, just as a burrow is to Mole.

Gregory – played by an engaging, gangly young John Gordon Sinclair – is in love. He has espied the first female member of his football team, and he must have her. He is in the first flush of teenage infatuation – remember it?

Writer and director Bill Forsyth simply distils that peerless feeling. One night Gregory opens his bedroom window onto the warm, new town Summer night. And he listens to a dog howl, somewhere out there where adventure is waiting.

So he howls back.

The scene concludes by panning out across the very ordinary night-time town, with the sound of the boy at the window, howling in answer to the dog, because somehow that window, and possibly also the dog, lets him connect with the unseen, waiting adventure of first love.

Windows, from either side, are full of promise. In Summer they are an open space from which Juliet might hail her lover; in Winter they are magic lanterns, showing Christmas trees and the gleaming promise of the lives of others.

They are a gallery of possibilities: an adventure which may, or may not, have anything to do with us.

Strange, what magic a pane of glass can weave: to convince those on either side of the magical properties of the other.