LITMIR.BIZ

       OCTOBER 2007

       About a year before our adventures began I dreamed of a house set in fields, with a moat round it. It was ramshackle and much too big, hidden away in a secret, sunny coomb that nobody but I knew about. I think it may have looked a little like a medieval castle, with tumbling ramparts and a drawbridge, and yet simultaneously like a large terraced house somewhere in Notting Hill Gate.

       In any case, in my dream I knew it was the house we’d been searching for. Not only that, I knew that this beautiful dream house, though surrounded by rivers and fields, was also within walking distance of Hammersmith tube station. And it was for sale. And it was being snapped up—not by an annoying Russian oligarch, nor even by my brother-in-law, the amazingly successful banker. It was being snapped up by us. We—husband, the two children, myself, and a mysterious brown puppy calling itself Mabel—were trading it in for our ordinary terraced house in Shepherds Bush, with its views over three giant satellite dishes and a multistorey car park, and we were going to live there, a life of carefree rural bliss, happily and wholesomely, for ever after. I remember waking up feeling exhilarated. And the feeling lasted, as I waded hither and thither through the usual Shepherds Bush knife victims and sundry litter, pretty much for the rest of the day.

      The quest to find a place more satisfactory than Shepherds Bush to raise our young children continued as it had before. The husband and I had bored ourselves to sleep sometimes, discussing the options: Los Angeles? Sri Lanka? Sydney? New York? Ealing Common?…Not all the suggestions were realistic of course, but because, like everyone else’s, the value of our ordinary terraced house seemed to quadruple each fortnight, almost every option we threw in, however absurd, felt vaguely, distantly possible.

       And there was always one thing we seemed to agree upon—that pretty much anywhere would be preferable to Shepherds Bush.

       So we talked and we talked. And we talked and we talked.

       And we talked.

       And then one day, suddenly, the talking finished. We had made a decision.

       I wonder now, with the benefit of the awful year and a half behind me, whether we were simply defeated by the sheer boredom of it. There came a point, perhaps, where neither of us could endure the conversation a moment longer.

       …New Orleans? Kirkbymoorside? Malibu? Pitlochry? Nassau? Switzerland? Isle of Man? Barbados? King’s Cross? Marylebone? Bordeaux? Lamu? Winchester? Westchester? Henley? Delhi?…

       The South West.

       The following diary has been edited slightly—I’ve obscured a few names (or changed them) and for obvious reasons I’ve removed any give-away clues to our precise location. Otherwise it stands pretty much as I wrote it, a fairly accurate record of one very urban woman’s foolhardy—idealistic—attempts to adapt to family life in the English countryside.

      I’d seen the property programmes. I’d read the lifestyle magazines. I’d looked in awe—and guilt—at the happy, healthy faces of those young families who dared to leave the Big Smoke behind them. They always make it look so easy. Don’t they.

       The following should be looked upon as a cautionary tale.