…is genuinely awesome this time. Coming over Parbold Hill at around 3pm, the sun was doing its best to remind me to pause & enjoy our planet for a moment. I nearly stopped and gazed, but was too fast & had 2 toddlers and a cat in the car…

From Parbold Hill on a good day you can see over Liverpool to the Welsh Hills. Although today was grey and murky, there were some gaps in the clouds over the Mersey Estuary & beyond. So the West Lancs (front-right) plain was cloudy, with theatrical shafts of orange-yellow light shining down behind the Liverpool skyline, and the shoulders of the hills rising behind them. It’s going to take me a while to tire of the Liverpool skyline anyway, but days like today remind me how glad I am that we live where we do. I know it’s nothing super-special, but it’s near some places that touch my heart for many reasons, and occasionally it takes your breath away.

Dare I say – Uluru eat your heart out!!

Brace yourselves for a hippie moment – the climbing rose at the end of the outhouses has been trying to catch my attention – I don’t think htere are any flowers further down, but at the top of the highest branch, where we in the house can see it from the landing, the rose has got 3 massive flower heads. I know they don’t look massive in this picture – that’s phone cameras for you! For a good couple of weeks, it’s been giving me a moment of “aah” whenever I go into the bathroom.

There you go – hippie moment over now!

We switched the aga back on this week. The engineer came to service it on Thursday, and also to show us how to switch it on, since the pilot light had gone out when we had the boiler replaced (how embarrassing is *that*??!? without his help we’d have just had a very bulky & not very spacious cupboard…)

 And now it’s lovely and warm in the kitchen, and the seat in the living room nearest to it, and I can further develop my delusion of living in a Joanna Trollop novel (without all the traumatic stuff or labradors, obviously!).

 I commented to the engineer that if we were made of money we’d get a proper gas aga (rather than a solid-fuel conversion to gas) so it’s less of a gas guzzler, but at the moment it was out of the question (at £6-10K a pop, it’s definitely in the luxury items bracket). He said they do reconditioned ones for £2.5-3K. At the time I thought he’d completely missed the meaning of the phrases “made of money” and “out of the question” but on reflection, at about 1.5xnew boiler it does in deed make it more of a proposition. So possibly only 10-15 years down the line, rather than over my dead body… (refers back to J-T-novel-delusion in head!!)

ps. including this in the eco-jude category ironically – I’m aware that no amount of plastic bag non-use will counter the effect of a season’s aga-gas-guzzling. I’ll make it up to the kids by leaving it to them…

We have a customer, an elderly lady who lives in Tyldesley in a 1-bed council bungalow – Mrs R. As I was chatting to her one visit, we got chatting about her crystal animals, and she said how sad she was that the teardrop crystal she used to have hanging at the window had broken so that she couldn’t hang it up any more. She talked about how she loved having rainbows flying round the room, but wasn’t able to anymore.

My Aunt Ann recently sent a solar-powered window crystal to Mum, which rotates mechanically when the (really bright) sun hits the solar panels. I mentioned this to Mrs R, and she was excited by the idea. So, when I got back to “base” I looked to see if I could find any on the web. I did, and next time I went back to Mrs R’s, I showed her where she could find them.

I found out yesterday that she now has rainbows bouncing around her front room again.

For other interested parties, here is the link: swarovski-crystal-rainbow-maker