Lack of rainfall and the garden.

As usual, we have drifted away from the original topic (nothing wrong with that ) but lighting is always a contentious issue.

Trying to draw a line between necessary lighting, aesthetic lighting, power conservation and light pollution is an impossibility - and everyone has their own ideas of where on the spectrum they wish to be.

We draw our line somewhere inbetween.

As there is no street lighting where we are - three street lights in two miles of country road and none in the village apart from around the where the council's retirement bungalows (sounds better than old people's bungalows ) - we need some lighting.

We have five lights, on timers, along the front of the building and a street lamp at the junction of our path and driveway. These are necessary for safety and security as we're set 100ft back from the road but we turn them off once we are esconced safely indoors (we're dirty stop-outs and quite often are not home until close to midnight).

On the back of our building (and on our summerhouse) we have a total of about ten lights which are only turned on if we need to go out there in the dark or if entertaining on the patio. I ocassionally sit out there in the dark looking at the glorious night sky lit by thousands/millions of twinkling stars and listening to the night life all around. If everyone had lights on all the time we would miss that wonderful sight.