The Couple Who Swore They'd Never Move To The Country

  Let’s start with the bad news. Despite readers contacting me in their – OK, in their twos – begging me to attend the “Meet The Village” morning and report back, I’m afraid we will be in London (London!) that weekend. The village will just have to lose out. Meanwhile, following the sudden feeling of being Settled In I reported on last time, life has become a kind of “Welcome to Country Living” induction programme.  Module One: trying to get rid of cardboard. We had amassed a garage full of the stuff, a mixture of flattened packing boxes and unflattenable cartons that once contained sofas and coffee tables. Immune to the regular cries of “when are you going to go to the dump?” I was determined to find a local tradesperson who would take it off our hands. Meanwhile, I continued to fill the empty boxes with old curtains and expanded polystyrene till we had our own grade one fire hazard right on our doorstep. To find the appropriately qualified individual, I did what every genuine village

  After three years, 28 blogs and much activity, last week I realised something had clicked. This is not an age-related issue; just as I woke up three years ago with an urge to relocate to a rural area, last week I suddenly felt completely at home here.  Even a hardened city dweller would have little trouble imagining the list of positive criteria that would make one glad to live in the country. You’ve probably already assembled the list before I can write it down: - Slower pace of life - Beautiful countryside - Community spirit Basically a Thomas Hardy novel without the tragic deaths and grinding poverty. Well, my list is not exactly different, but it’s nuanced. Let me start with community spirit. Those who know me will attest I have never been champing at the bit to fill my house with the warmth and and tinkling laughter of manifold visitors. So I approached a little nervously the Londoner’s image of a world where everyone pops in and out of your dwelling. Happily, having chosen a ho

  A passer by knocked at our door earlier this week; I was about to embark on a “welcome, weary traveller, please warm yourself in front of the fire” routine to convince him we were genuine country folk, but he wasn’t stopping. He wanted to let us know that he ran a construction company and that our scaffolding was unsafe. He painted various lurid pictures of what might happen if a passing lorry struck it a glancing blow. I reassured him that it was being taken down that very day. I’m not sure why I was feeling so confident about this. This was, after all, the third day on which it was due to be cleared. On the first day two horny-handed sons of toil had arrived and said they could only take half of it because it wouldn’t all fit on the van. The following day someone else turned up with a slightly smaller van and said he could only take half of what was left. I envisage a day four weeks in the future, when the solitary remaining pole is cut in half so it’ll fit in a Fiat 500. The scaff

  The number of workmen at our house at any one time has dwindled to a couple of grizzled blokes on scaffolding (the bathroom isn’t finished, but the installers seem to have given up and disappeared, leaving a handy bath on the landing) so my week’s quota of frustrating conversations has had to come from utility companies, with Plusnet providing a particular collector’s item: “Hi, I’m confused why you’re charging me this £100 penalty.” “You cancelled your contract.” “Yes, but I had already started a new contract for the house I was moving to, so that’s technically me staying with you.” “You cancelled the contract, so we’ve issued a penalty charge” “But don’t you see I have another contract with you?” “Yes, but you didn’t follow the house move policy.” “OK, but if you take the spirit of the policy–“ “I’ll ask you not to get aggressive. You didn’t follow the policy, so we’re charging a penalty.” “I want to escalate this. I want to speak to someone who can override the policy, now.” “That

  During our brief visits to the house before we moved in properly, I pined for all my stuff. I couldn’t tell you what the stuff actually was, but I knew that when I was sitting in my office room in London the shelves behind me were full of comforting stuff, rather than the bare void around me now. Well, the comforting stuff followed us down here, along with all the other stuff from every room in our flat, and now I find myself pining for the simple days when we would spend a few days here in a beautiful void with just essential clothing and a few bits of crockery, leading that simple rural life we’ve all heard about. You don’t have to open many removal cartons before you swear to join the ranks of those artists and idealists who get rid of all their possessions and start all over again. I feel it rather more keenly I suppose, because in a way this country living project carries with it a promise of simplicity. But is it just us? Or does everyone move house by boxing up all the things

  My mother moved into the annex flat this week. (No jokes, sorry, she reads this blog.) She didn’t have to suffer the legacy of the Dirty Dentists  (we’d had her flat cleaned), but they still did their best from The Beyond to disrupt her moving in, with washing machine plumbing that was in a separate cupboard and too far for the hoses to reach, and a fridge mains plug that was in front of, rather than behind, the fridge space so the mains lead couldn’t get to it. In a moment of resonance, we experienced a similar conundrum when we finally got around to connecting our TV to the TV cable coming out of the wall in the snug (I know, I never believed in my youth I would become the kind of person who referred to a room in their house as The Snug, but to be fair it does have an ancient bread oven in the wall) and discovered it has no signal. There is an aerial atop the roof, and a cable snaking down the wall, but they don’t seem to be talking to each other. I’m going to take the puppy round