Apart from the storms that kept me awake for much of last night, (almost continuous lightning has a great way of lighting up the bedroom when you are temporarily without curtains!) the weather has been pretty good lately which has meant that my 86 year old mother has been able to enjoy a few al fresco meals on our patio. My office, which is next to the patio, is built around the old Victorian outside loo, which although far nicer than one might picture, still has the original loo because it’s set at an angle and replacing it with something more modern will involve digging out and replacing all the drains, which I can’t be doing with right now.

I’ve noticed over the past couple of years that rather than use this loo, my mother has chosen to make her way through the house to tackle the very steep stairs to our upstairs bathroom instead and last night she told me why. Apparently, as she gets older, she’s finding it more and more difficult to sit on – and get up from - the low seat of the downstairs WC.

A press release from our friends at DRA Public Relations informed me today that as we are all growing taller (they supplied the figures to prove it) their client has started manufacturing basins and WC’s  in taller versions, to make life easier for us. Now that’s really what you call providing solutions for your users’ problems, isn’t it? And with all the recent figures showing that many of us in the developed world are becoming more obese than ever, I can see everything having to be built to withstand heavier weights too!

In kitchen news, I learned from XFM radio today that a company is selling the option of the ‘toaster selfie’. You supply an image of yourself (or, I presume, anything else of interest) and it adapts a toaster so that it will produce slices of toast featuring the image.

Makes a change from Jesus, doesn’t it?

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Yours,

Jan Hobbs