There were late blackberries on the hedgerows and ripe apples on the tree in the garden; there were dusty stubble fields for Dennis to canter through; there were a few spiders in the kitchen sink, but I bravely managed to overlook them. Country spiders seem more natural than city spiders, anyway. Same as foxes.
I’ve recently returned from 10 days at my mother’s house in West Sussex, dog-sitting while she was away, and find myself having one of my periodical wobbles that I should move to the country. It was glorious down there, partly because of the late-summer sunshine. The light is sliding away from us at this time of year, but that makes what we have left all the more poignant. I took the dogs (Dennis, who is mine, and Mum’s terrier, Beano) out for a final stroll every evening as the sky turned shades of pink, and bar a slightly alarming moment with a deer in one field, it was magnificent.
Is it a sign of middle age to start craving space and the country? I have lived in and loved London for more than 20 years. I spent my teenage years sneaking into dubious Chelsea pubs; I went to university here; I worked for the Evening Standard when I graduated and survived by eating canapés for dinner at swanky bar openings. I have moved around the city, from south to west, to a bit more west, then down to a leafy patch of the south-east.
It is splendid in so many ways: things to do, people to see, stuff to look at. But has it become ever-so-slightly less splendid in recent years? Even more expensive, nightmarish to travel even half a mile across it, and plenty of people shifting out.
Also, after an incident in the park a few weeks ago, I looked up the postcode with the highest number of XL bullys in the country (you can do this now, but you’re probably safe if you’re, say, somewhere on the Lizard peninsula), and it’s Croydon, which isn’t so far from me. So in the same way that people profess to move to the country because there’s less knife crime in the Pennines, might Dennis be best off somewhere else? I’m not saying I’m off to Dubai or Dar es Salaam, as I wrote about various friends deciding to do a couple of weeks ago, but what about 50 or 60 miles out? That’s not so far, is it?
I’m also, suddenly, unexpectedly, heartbroken and single again. So Dennis and I (Dennis is the puppy, just to be clear, not the ex) really could up sticks and head out – a reverse Dick Whittington, knotted handkerchief over my shoulder.
The Country Life website is a guilty pleasure, much as the first 40 pages or so of the magazine is for others because of the property. So let’s have a look. Ooh, there’s a little 400-year-old thatched cottage for sale near Arundel, half the price of my London flat. But does thatch harbour spiders? I’ve always suspected it might. Or a sweet little house near Ludlow for £325,000, although the estate agent says it comes with an “interesting garden”, which presumably means it’s a bog, or has bodies underneath it.
Right now, quite sad and weepy post break-up, I like the look of the one on the Isle of Barra. It’s monstrously ugly, as certain Scottish houses have to be to withstand the dreich. And it has a purple kitchen, for some reason, plus the sort of patterned carpet you find in middle-management hotels, designed to hide the stains from corporate functions. But it’s large, not far from the sea, and looks just the sort of place Dennis and I could walk around and howl together.
It’s probably a bit extreme. Most Londoners these days seem to head for very specific patches of the Cotswolds because they’re the closest approximation to London: Notting Hill with a few fields. Pretty stone houses, wildly expensive pubs, members’ clubs, courgettes for a fiver (each) in the farm shop, and everybody they know from the city there. Not a single local who’s been there for longer than, ooh, five or six years, because they’ve been priced out. “It only takes an hour into Paddington from Banbury,” these people chunter.
But I’m not sure the Cotswolds is the country anymore, is it? Certainly not the Golden Triangle, which is the patch between Stow-On-The-Wold, Chipping Norton and Burford. I was informed of this by a pa – one of those posh, country estate agents whose face appears underneath the sales particulars for £10 million Grade-I piles. During the Covid frenzy, he says, he was being called up by people shrieking, “We’ve got no idea what the villages are called, but that’s where we need to be.”
So, probably not there, either. I’ve done spells in Yorkshire and Norfolk before for book-writing purposes. Although, in the former, I realised I’d probably isolated myself for too long when I bought an entire rabbit for my supper from a farmer and lived off the stew for several days. Quite feral. And in the latter, once the clocks went back, I started carting my laptop to the nearest pub at 4pm, when it started getting dark, with the romantic but possibly mistaken view that several large glasses of red would get the novel finished faster.
Look, all I’m saying is I need somewhere affordable and pretty with decent insulation, which is spider-proof, comes with a stove, a sublime view, with fast train links into London. Plus, it must only be a five-minute drive from the local Co-op, and have plenty of walking for my small furry friend. There’s got to be plenty of that sort of thing knocking about, right? Or have those pesky Londoners snapped them all up already?
I desperately need a sweet little cottage in the country. But rich Londoners have bought them all
The allure of the country promises long dog walks, cosy pubs and plenty more space than in the capital