I don’t think I lower my standards though to avoid disappointment, I am more the kinda of person who fights off an inside feeling that disappointment is inevitable but, maybe this time it might never happen.

It is, I guess, a kind of foolish optimism. I can get over disappointment quite well too luckily. Hope springs back pretty quickly for me.

I like the idea of being less convinced about the disappointments – disappointment is a reaction rather than a fact. Some people seem to go through life collecting disappointment – I know that ‘making the best of a bad job’ may mean that you might lower your standards (temporarily at least), but isn’t that better than a lifetime wallowing in disappointment?

I remain also, I suppose, I suppose one of those people who lives in that utopian moment in time between hope and disappointment.

I am beginning to believe though that those disappointments may never happen.

Murphy’s Law is ideal for pessimists isn’t it? Can we have a positive version – not a Panglossian “this is the best of all possible worlds” but a “things turn out right in the end”. Maybe it is the triumph of hope over experience – but is that such a bad thing?

Maybe we are the only people, us living now, nothing else is profoundly in our reality…the rest is a beautiful story, an adornment to our experience.

As an ill-traveled Euro-American I’m always astonished to discover that there were actually people on the planet doing things prior to say the landing on Plymouth Rock. Wow.

You are such a nosey person – always wanting to know what the neighbours are up to.

Our hill, or bracht as it is called for some mysterious linguistic reason, might even have been older than the 11th. century – in fact it probably was.

Where I live we have a Norman castle which overlooks the town from a similar high vantage point. I might post a picture one day.

Our bracht was the second defensive position and was enclosed within the same wall that surrounded the castle.

Archeologists think it had a wooden keep on its summit and would have been a part of the castle’s garrison.

There is a theory that it is even older than that – it could have been an Iron Age fortification.

Whichever is right, they are pretty certain that it was originally a much smaller natural hill which was increased by 2/3rds to be used a military vantage point.

I have been up there (illegally – woops) and you can see for miles in all directions.

In the 18th. Century, there was a tea or coffee pavilion at the top and it was used by fashionable folk who liked doing things like climbing a short hill and feeling that they had conquered a mountain.

Nowadays it is derelict but owned by the Sussex Archeological Society who keep it in trim.It gives all us lucky neighbours a piece of open countryside right in the middle of town.

It also protects my small courtyard garden from the wind and weather making it very hot and sheltered in the summer but quite dark in winter. A good place for growing roses, clematis, climbing fuchsias and passion flowers.

I am very lucky living here, I think.