“ Farewell to our solar museum …"

IT HAD become a ritual: I’d take visitors up to the top of the garden to look down on our roof of solar panels, including the antique first two we bought in the early 1980s, home installed, just enough for lights – and which were wrongly wired so they never worked efficiently till I met Bryan.

“Darling, why didn’t you tell me you had solar panels!” he exclaimed, the first day I spent with him in Canberra. He came down to the valley the next weekend to bond with them, and he never really left.* We married a year later.

Over the next 20 years or so