I’m lurching around in that terrible good:bad world that I seem to spend so much of my time inhabiting. After yesterday’s “bad”, more of it followed today but so did some “good” too.

I got to speak on the phone with an old friend who I’d lost touch with and yet weirdly, even though the conversation was “catching up” it gave me new heart and the time since we last spoke felt like a couple of weeks. It just seemed as though there were a dozen “monumental” things all crammed into a small length of time because we covered her illness, marriage, moving house, a three and a half year old daughter and a son within weeks of being born, not to mention a fabulous career, discussions about old friends and colleagues, all rolled into a half-hour long conversation.

From my point of view it covered failed marriage, new life and love with DM, massive life-stage and career changes.

When she told a colleague, who’d walked into her office and seen her smiling to herself, she told him about hearing from about me and mentioned I lived on Bodmin Moor and his response was “she must be bonkers…..why would anyone want to live there, it’s so inhospitable and wild.”

Strangely, yesterday we finished off the windows here (well, actually builders did). We had two where the sealed two-pane unit of double glazing were completely blown, leaving both windows looking as though they were “obscured glass”. You could see nothing at all through them. Now there are new windows and instead of looking like staring out at fog, you can now see the magical views we have. In fact, you can stand in the doorway between the two rooms and see two moving paintings of moorland life, complete with frames and glass. It has turned a nasty vista into a real delight and transformed the rooms from squalid to perfectly nice living spaces in the space of a couple of hours. I thought about the view when she was telling me about the comments from her friend and while I agree about the wild-ness, I know that it’s exactly that that makes this place so special.

So, I have some new ideas for the heart and I do regret setting fire to it late last year. I thought to myself, it’s about time a new one was made and put to the uses in my head.

Last year, I was preparing for the plasterers to come in.......this year, I'm preparing (steeling myself) for new ones to come and rip out what the others did and replace the plaster with damp-proof stuff then more plaster that hopefully won't have things growing in it! Hmmmm - that seems like bad planning but believe me, there was no evidence of damp in what was there before so I maintain we couldn't have known and therefore saved ourselves all of this anguish.