Back to blogging

I can’t believe that it’s nearly a month since I wrote my last blog. I had got into such good habits during lockdown. Back then, with oceans of time available, it was no problem finding a few hours a week in order to write a short piece based on whatever thoughts happened to be flitting through my head at the time. But these days life is so much busier and those few hours are harder to find. So many other things are now jostling for my attention that the jigsaw puzzles aren’t getting a look-in, the daily tai chi in the garden is a thing of the past and the sock drawer remains unsorted.

In addition to the renewed demands of daily life and the pressing need to travel, we decided it was time to sell our house and move to some yet-to-be-determined location, and that calls for a lot of mental and physical energy. It’s only when you have prospective buyers coming to view your house that you look around and realise that although you might consider dusting to be a waste of valuable time, potential owners can’t be expected to peer through layers of the stuff in order to see the hidden beauty of your home. You might see no point in tidying the kitchen throughout the day when you can do it just once in the evening, but others might not be quite so forgiving. Our house had never been so clean and tidy and we’d never been so exhausted.

It’s all very well putting your house on the market, but then you have to decide where to go. House-hunting sounds like great fun until you actually do it and then discover how little there is that meets your exacting – and somewhat contradictory – criteria. We want to live in a town with access to shops, cafés and a theatre, but we’d also like a decent sized garden that’s not overlooked by neighbouring houses. Naturally we expect to have lovely countryside walks available right from our doorstep. Then there’s the house itself, which must have at least three bedrooms, lots of character and parking (although an electric charging pod might well be too much to ask), all at a reasonable price. The biggest challenge of all is that we’re not entirely sure where this house will be. England probably, but Tunisia looks quite appealing too. Canada is both too cold and too hot.

None of this will be happening anytime soon. Buying and selling houses takes forever in England and there is an enormous backlog, as there is for everything at the moment. So I think we’ll continue our property search, while also planning our next trip. The country that is both too cold and too hot is calling to us and should be just right to visit in the autumn.