The thing about living “on top of the world” is that sky is all around you. When the sky is doing scary things (like last week), that’s not so hot but when you get up from the sofa to go and make a coffee, look up through the window and see this, then you realise that you can’t be in a better place. It's true to say this was shot from inside our lounge - I didn't even need to step outside to get the shot.

We rarely suffer from light pollution here – there are no street lights, although we have been sometimes debated whether or not we could get away with taking a sledgehammer to our neighbours’ security light, which is faulty and regularly lights us up like a strange and rather unglamorous Christmas tree. I have considered floating around the garden in a sheet and fairy wings in response but somehow always managed to avoid such crass behaviour. So, they waste 500 watts per hour and we get the small and inglorious consolation that their money is being poured down the drain (or more specifically the pockets of their electricity supplier) on electricity and we get no sleep.

We got a bit excited about the sky tonight because there is a meteor shower later and when I took this photo there were enough gaps in the cloud to see something. Sadly the gaps have got smaller and the greyness now envelopes us so we’re unlikely to see anything spectacular.

A couple of years ago, we sat in deck chairs in the garden at midnight and watched the Perseids. I have never seen anything like it before. There were shooting stars zooming about all over the place. Splendid.