Moving to the country

everything I've learned so far

Today is the ninth anniversary of us moving to Suffolk. Before that I’d been in London for 45 years, and before that I’d still only ever lived in cities.

I remember the day so well - the huge brown removal vans, saying goodbye and thank you to the London house that had served us so nobly, the long journey to our new home, and One Day Like This by Elbow on the radio as we came down the lane, so that the chorus exploded as we turned into the drive. I remember the exhilarating feeling of being at the start of a whole new adventure. It was a grey day and the meadow had just been baled for hay (‘What do we do with all that hay?’ ‘No idea. What actually is hay? Is it the same as straw?’).

Perhaps curiously, in the chaos of those first few days - it is so odd to dismantle a life and then reassemble it in a whole new place - I didn’t once think, ‘What have we done?’. I just knew. And I was right. Living here is always a privilege, and in bad times it has been an extraordinary comfort.

I’ll do a post at some point about how to make a house feel like home quickly - unfortunately the main ingredient is time and plenty of it, but there are ways and means of speeding things up a bit. Today I just wanted to jot down some things that might be useful if you’re considering this sort of drastic move yourself.

For reference: I live properly in the sticks - like, a 20 minute drive for a pint of milk sticks - and so the below applies to the sticks. Things will be a little bit different for the lesser sticks, and different again for the semi-sticks.