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

By the third month of failing to sell our flat, we could no longer bear to Wait Till We Have A Buyer before house hunting. We reframed it as another Proof Of Concept experiment, to ascertain that a suitable property was readily available. And within our price range, wasn’t it just. It became clear we could swap our three bedroom flat for a house with a swimming pool/a sauna/stables and a paddock/three acres of grounds with orchard and chicken coop. We could buy a medieval courthouse with original features (and no doubt medieval miscreants bricked up in the walls). The trouble was, we had too much choice. Obviously, as Londoners, top of our criteria was Decent Broadband (which, you had probably guessed, reduced the list of potential properties by 90%). Obviously, as Londoners, we would get into a cold sweat if we weren’t able to return to the capital speedily at a moment’s notice, so a station close by was non negotiable. (This wasn’t so prohibitive as you might think: much of Dorset is

Whenever I tell anyone about Helen and I planning to move to the country, I can’t stop myself adding “but we thought of it first”. For in the couple of years which have passed since we first started talking about making a new rural life for ourselves, the country has succumbed to the grip of a deadly pandemic which, according to the media, has infected Londoners’ brains and made them obsessed with moving out of the city.   Let’s all calm down a moment: if you ease your way past the tabloid headlines and items on The One Show , the truth is less dramatic. Londoners are moving, it is clear, but their desire is not for a rural idyll of village pubs, Morris dancing and teenagers getting banjoed on cider and Tipp-ex in the local bus shelter; they just want space. Terraced house owners are moving out thirty odd miles to get a bigger garden; flat owners are moving to terraced houses to get any kind of garden.  This is all relevant to my tale, and not just because we were obviously the first

It started with Helen, whose anti-rural-living views were well known to all; she had always, everyone knew, regarded the countryside as a muddy, grubby, inbred thing best avoided. Yet here she was, saying out of the blue, “I think we should move to the country". She said it as we were returning from a weekend in the Cotswolds. Of course it was the Cotswolds: the place all Londoners want to live but none do, instead popping there at weekends to drive around in a queue of Porsche Cayennes believing they have made their lives simpler. We too had been enjoying the simple life, in a sprawling country pile belonging to a friend’s family, its garden a riot of meadow flowers and triffid-like artichokes. We had visited a couple of beautiful rural churches, and a local village fair with a dog show and a prize for Most Abundant Peapod (that’s not the Crufts name of one of the dogs, by the way). So there we were, heading back London-wards, when she uttered that simple phrase. If you were ever