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

And so, dear reader, your reward for having suffered along with us on our journey is you have caught up: I will transport you to the present. I am writing this in our new house (gasp), completion having taken place yesterday. We are moving in phases, as we can’t leave London full time till Helen finishes her job in the summer; so it’ll be Easter school holiday down here, then reverting to being weekenders until we can move wholesale. I am drinking a cup of tea made with water boiled on the Aga - I know, I know, I feel like the central character in a 90s chicklit novel. Presumably any second now a bronzed, muscular but also sensitive neighbour will ring at the door offering to moisten my meringues. My mission was to lead an advance guard (i.e. me) on completion day (yesterday), driving down the A303 in a hired transit van laden with essentials - a couple of chairs, a bed, HDMI and ethernet cables (call me ruralist, but I suspect the corner shop won’t stock them). You will know, having f

It’s hard to remember that solicitors work for you when they keep dropping anxieties at your door. Only in a German fetish club, or a London taxi, might I also pay someone a large amount of money to give me grief. It starts with the local authority search. This is built up as a document which will hugely influence your housebuying decision, but all it contains are a series of questions to which the answer is no, like “Are there any current plans to bulldoze the house to the ground and construct a municipal car park?” Actually, to be accurate, the answer is usually something more like “not as far as aware” or “none at present”. Anything you pay for during the house buying process is heavily caveated. Also of course, local authorities are political institutions and no doubt, having given you the all clear on the search form, will return to their blueprints for constructing a 5 lane motorway through your herbaceous border. It doesn’t stop there. There’s a Radon Report - radon, that sub

You’d think it would be simple. We wanted a mortgage; Santander wanted mortgage customers. A relationship made in heaven, surely? Perhaps it would have been simpler if we could have formed a relationship with them directly. But mortgage underwriters, it seems, are stunted, scaly creatures, incapable of speech, who emerge from their holes only to defecate on the mortgage applications of the unwary. We had to hire a specialist translator, a mortgage advisor who looked like a wombat in the only photo I could find when I cyberstalked him. He was upbeat, hugely optimistic about our chances.  And why not? Apply Santander’s standard multiple to our incomes and, according to the wombat, we could borrow enough to build a supertanker and put our house inside it. But you are already one step ahead; you can hear the tense music that would start playing at this point if this were an ITV drama. For, it seems, part way through our application process, Santander decided to Crack Down On Self Employe

It was ten months since we had put our flat on the market. Still the prospective buyers trudged through, moaning about climbing stairs to the flat, the roof terrace being on the roof, the fact their toddler might plunge from the unprotected full height window with a five storey drop to the back garden (what can I say? It was built in the 70s). But we had three still-available properties on the shortlist - and we both agreed which was our favourite. Then Helen, who you remember started our whole rural trajectory with a simple short phrase, did it again. “There must be another way of doing this, without selling the flat.” Like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now , I felt “like I’d been shot… with a silver bullet… right through my forehead… and I thought… my God! The genius of that!” It had never occurred to me that there might be another way. But that’s why she’s at the pinnacle of her profession while I scrabble around like a corporate troubadour. Anyway, I rang a mortgage broker, explained

By the end of Summer 2020, things were falling into place. We had been country dwellers for the best part of three months, living in a rural cottage opposite a stables (sadly empty as the residents had been evicted for leaping over the fence and causing havoc in the road) and felt enthused by country life; our criteria for choosing our dream house had been tightened up by my mother coming on board (needing to live somewhere where a family member could be right next door in case of emergency - so we were looking for House With Annexe); and… No, we hadn’t sold our London flat; that was the missing link.  It had now been on the market for seven months. Mum gets ready to blend in with the locals We continued to drool over the Dream House I told you about last time - which did have an annexe, a rather nice two floor one. The agents would ring us every so often to say it was still available and what was our position? Hopeless, we replied. We trekked back to London at the end of our three mo