My partner, Chris, and I are moving from a tenth-floor flat with a balcony in the inner London borough of Lewisham to a Georgian house with two-and-a-half acres in a remote area of the Scottish Borders.
I am planning to write a regular blog, return to taking proper photographs rather than mainly just camera-phone snaps and I want to collect material for another book. The details and direction are currently vague, but I want the central focus to be our house in Scottish Borders.
Our situation is, in some respects, privileged; we are buying a house and don’t have to give up our London flat. However, the house came about as a result of the death of Chris’s mum last year and a close family friend of mine the year before. Our London flat is unsellable due to a still-unresolved Grenfell cladding issue, but we also have work commitments in London and uncertainty around future work and my mum not being in good health and living in Kent.
We started our property search around Hastings in August 2021. Chris’s mum had lived in a village outside Hastings and for three of the months we were dealing with probate, we lived there and viewed more than fifteen properties in the area. With one exception, none of the properties ticked enough of our boxes. Once we moved out ahead of the sale of the bungalow, we both realised a more drastic change was what we wanted and probably needed. For the next seven months, we looked (mainly online only) at the west of England, the Welsh/English borders, a few random areas based on houses we liked the look of, Aberdeenshire and then, from July 2022, the England/Scotland border. After our third trip up to, more specifically, Scottish Borders, we knew we’d found an area we both loved. We had offers rejected on two houses from our second trip, but the third on our third trip is the one we are moving into on Friday. This week. Gulp.
We didn’t start off looking at houses in remote locations, but as noise levels around our flat increased and annoyed us more over summer while we were both writing and/or working from home (the communal garden area being used as a free-for-all kids’ playground – honestly, I don’t know that you can imagine how loud, shouty and bangy it was every single day and evening in the school holidays. Coupled with city noises from having windows and the balcony door open to try to deal with the stifling heat of a well-insulated but poorly-ventilated new-build flat), the appeal of living far away from other people and man-made noise increased.
The house we are moving to has one neighbour (we didn’t want to be completely isolated) but is more than half an hour’s drive to the nearest shops or train station.
I do not intend this blog to be about the personal hardships and joys of my experience, though I want to share some of the as-yet-unknown realities of making such a big move. At least at this stage, my primary motivator is that I know if I write about projects, I am more likely to DO them. I am not a do-er unless I have the right inspiration and motivation.
For example, fungi. The current owners told me that edible mushrooms grow in the woods beyond the house. I have never picked, cooked and eaten foraged mushrooms. As with many things I am confronted with in life, if I don’t feel confident or prepared for something, I often don’t do it. I want to teach myself to identify mushrooms I can pick and eat. I know that, assuming I learn to identify correctly, I would feel enormous satisfaction (A) being able to pick, cook and eat mushrooms from the surrounding countryside and (B) being able to walk through the woods with friends who visit (the ones who know nothing about fungi!) and point out what can and can’t be eaten. I want to make myself learn things, things that will benefit and, maybe slightly cheesy, enhance my everyday life.
We will have a garden and land. I don’t just want to let it all go wild and hope the more gardeny elements will look after themselves with a bit of sporadic, ill-informed weeding. I want to learn enough to know what to do. Instead of thinking, That grassy slope gets too muddy and slippery to walk up, I wish there were steps up it, and never doing anything about it, I want to figure out what to do and, realistically, get help to make those steps. Such projects are massively outside my comfort zone and perceived abilities. I need to leave my comfort zone more often.
Another project is I want to make my study into an India-inspired room, with that old, ugly varnished cabinet painted in bright colours with patterns from the woodblocks and stencils I have from India. I don’t have the know-how or confidence to think I can make something look as good as it looks in my head. But I know that if I did some research, felt I ‘had to’ see my idea through for the purpose of the blog, I would do it. And it might even look really good.
As for the book I want to write in tandem, I’m not entirely sure the direction that will take. I felt inspired by The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady when I flicked through a copy that had been in Chris’s late mum’s bungalow. If I wrote about nature, I would pay more attention to the natural world around me, photograph it more, research more, learn to identify plants and birds, for example. I like – actually, love – the idea of that, but I don’t think that’s solely what I want to concentrate on. Maybe I will write about the things I learn, make and do and see all my projects to completion. Maybe, as with the book I have almost finished writing, it will be fiction, a story set in, or at least inspired by, that kind of environment.
That pretty much sums up the year ahead. Neither Chris nor I have any idea how we’ll get on living somewhere that is completely outside our comfort zone. We will both have to return to London quite often but envisage living in the Scottish house maybe eighty percent of the time. A year from now, I genuinely have no idea about so many things I had previously kind of taken for granted, from location of work (London, but mainly Middle East and India) and actual work (long story but I was working as a freelance stenographer for twenty years; now only able to do it every now and then) to how or if my outlook, priorities and inspiration affect how I spend my home life and maybe also my income-earning life. Will we hate it, will we love it; how will we adapt to our new life?
I am writing this just days before the move. There is a lot I will miss about not living every day in London, from friends to the variety and multiculturalism of amenities within walking distance. But we both feel ready for – well, I’ve said it repeatedly, but it’s change and adapting to a new environment that I think we both need. As I look across the balcony, it’s almost stopped raining. I can see the homes of hundreds of other people, the rain has made the road noise louder, the occasional train rattles past, the sound of rain is mostly from balconies dripping and water flowing down tall plastic drainpipes. A week from now, I imagine the weather will be similar, but little else. I can barely wait to start the next year. Very Exciting.