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

  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

  Here’s a simple question. You’ve just moved house. There are two bathrooms, one of which is gutted and the other three-quarters functional. The decorators are occupying one of the main rooms you want to live in. The outside of the house is shrouded in scaffolding, with more delivered every day. At any one time there are probably seven workmen in the house. What would be the most sensible response? Answer: bring a puppy home, obvs. And so it was that three days after we moved in permanently, we collected Mishka, our miniature schnauzer, from the breeder. She was designated our therapy dog, a calming presence when all around was chaos.  And the signs were good. On arriving home she went straight into her crate (or “den” as the puppy book likes to call it) and curled up on the bed. She almost slept through the night. She played with the toys we’d bought. She liked being held. There was just the matter of the house training. "What is this 'outside' of which you speak?"

  And so on Wednesday the Adventure Proper began. A removal van turned up at our flat.  I had secured a parking suspension outside for them, but unfortunately some miscreant had parked a car overnight right in the middle of the bay. While I attempted to assure the removal crew that I really had got it all under control, a traffic warden arrived, and , sensing the gravity of the situation, radioed for a crane to come and forcibly remove the offending vehicle.  What a shame we never got to experience the drama of an Audi A3 dangling from a gantry, as its owner appeared at that very moment. He was a builder from a neighbouring site, and displayed the calmest response to a parking ticket I’ve ever seen, departing with a shrug like a cockney character from a 1940s film (“That’s taught me a lesson an’ no mistake”). In came the removers and set to work, packing into boxes anything that stayed still for five seconds, and dismantling anything bigger than a box. I had that tricky job of having n

  More bathroom shenanigans. You may have had enough of these, but I’ll keep it brief. Just wanted to share my amazement that the format of their issue-raising should be so consistent. “About the asbestos soil pipe” “Yes….?” “The specialist firm have come to remove it.” “Great” “Except they didn’t remove it. You see, it goes under the ground.” “Yes, that’s what soil pipes do.” “So to replace it under the ground we’d have to dig up all the concrete.” “Sure, we don’t want that.” “We could replace the section above the ground.” “Great, do that.” “They’ve gone now.” “Er…” “And at the top, you see, it goes right above the roof. That’s very high. You’d need scaffolding.” “Remember I told you the guttering people will have scaffolding.” “Yes, but it would have to go up to the roof.” “It will. That’s where the guttering is.” “Oh. There’s no problem then.” “I know this.” "Your bathroom's all ready. We couldn't get hold of you to ask whether you wanted us to clean up afterwards...&q