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

Wherever you look, artisans are doing things to our properties. In London, we need to get the flat into a condition whereby tenants are less likely to ring on a Saturday night because they’ve seen a moth, or the lights flickered, or they’ve staggered drunkenly against the wooden roof terrace fence, smashed through it and fallen five storeys to their - stop, stop, I get enough exercise thinking about that in the middle of the night, we need not speak of it now. Suffice to say it’s all distressed purchase stuff - anti pigeon spikes on the ledges, an RCD board for the main electrical circuit, and so on. Out West, the horny-handed sons of toil are massing for Home Improvement purposes. The Dirty Dentists laid cream carpets in every room, and any wall that stopped moving for long enough was painted magnolia. Not the kind of thing you can criticise them for, these being nice neutral colours, but after a few weeks of having them permanently imprinted on your retina, the effect is similar to b

Last time I mentioned the urge to romanticise rural living. This is not a new phenomenon, wrought from the fevered imaginations of Sunday newspaper columnists. It goes back a little further. If you travelled back to medieval England, you would be unlikely to find anyone using the word “idyll” - and not just because no one went to school. Life in the country was brutal and unforgiving - and if a land worker decided to take a break for five minutes and go for a walk, they’d probably be stabbed by a passing ne’er-do-well. Cycle forward a few centuries and we most likely have two men to thank - or blame - for our modern view of rural life: Gainsborough and Constable. Their immaculate landscapes engendered an obsession with rural perfection which fuelled a boom in property development by the wealthy, who paid landscape gardeners (the title is no accident) to make their gardens look, to use the newly coined word, picturesque . "Plus there's plenty of room to park the Range Rover

The central heating broke down on Sunday - the traditional day for heating failure. We rang the engineer recommended by the dirty dentists, and he told us this was the first time the boiler had ever broken down. Was he accusing us? It’s possible that we had overworked the boiler, leaving it on all day where true country folk would only run it for 30 minutes a day in midwinter, leaving all the windows open and huddling round the Aga to tell stories of the time Old Seth tried to mend his boiler himself and was last spotted eight degrees South of the International Space Station. It turned out - of course - to be something simple I could have done myself. “How much do I owe you?” I asked hoarsely. I braced myself for the £50 call out charge plus some other expensive items I wasn’t expecting.“Oh, don’t worry, I won’t charge for this - I was coming this way anyway.” Yes - this is why we moved to the country, for a simple world of decent people with comedy accents.  The following day we cal

Well, if you’re looking for drama, how about the we-nearly-burned-our-new-house-down excitement? “Where’s that smoke coming from?” asked Helen, standing by the bathroom window in the glow of the morning sun. I followed her gaze and saw one of the wooden pieces of the window frame apparently steaming. Moisture evaporating in the sun perhaps? Then I noticed the bright pinpoint of light in the centre of the “steam” and realised that the magnifying mirror which jutted out from the wall by the window was focusing the sun’s rays on a point on the frame and it was on the verge of going up in flames. We’ll see if we can top that next week. The only other danger we’ve faced this week was the danger to my mental health of sorting out the wifi. The must-have networking aid these days is “mesh” wifi. This is basically the same as what we used to call a wifi extender, except it costs twenty times as much, because it’s, er, “mesh” rather than “extender”. Whereas an extender just takes the wifi sign

A week on from my lonely vigil in the new house and we are feeling settled already. We returned à deux last Friday, to live like squatters, with minimal furniture and possessions piled where they stopped moving. A steady flow of deliveries, from kitchen table to Japanese secateurs, has made the house feel more complete, and filled an entire garage with empty packaging material. So it is that I can write this sitting properly at a table, gazing out of the window at the Sold sign that no one has taken away (has any estate agent ever taken away a Sold sign? Don’t they need them for other properties they’ve sold? Is there a landfill site somewhere filled entirely with Sold signs?).  And I’m sure the thing you are most interested in, knowing us as the couple who swore they’d never move to the country, is Any regrets so far? And I can definitely report no; we love it here, and we have both found the house a very homely and welcoming one. Apart from the dirt.  You may remember I wrote in an