A frosty start…

we arrived in our new house at the beginning of February. In the frost. 

The strangest of all feelings was driving up the hill and the narrow drive through the lofty trees towards our new house...and new life. A journey made after a year of negotiations, cul de sacs and hulking upheavals in all forms - (oh yes plus the 8 years of searching all over the country for somewhere that fitted our exacting and contradictory wish list). 

And on that day we headed towards a place we hardly knew and into a life we knew even less of. We had only managed fleetingly visits to the house and garden but had scurried into the slice of woodland on a few occasions as it has a public right of way through it - hugging the slope above the stream. The vendors found leaving after 25 years very hard and our prying eye wasn’t helping. So the purchase was painful and arms length and based on a sense more than cold, calm reality.  I had fallen in love with the atmosphere as you approached the front door. The view beyond over the wall to the gentle hill which turns out to look at England. We literally graze the border. 

On that first day I was conscious that whatever we found we had to embrace. The kids spilled out of the car and bounded around the garage a good start - space! Then Laurie eventually opened the stiff front door... my eyes were on stalks, literally like some strange beetle that needs to assess its environment quickly. It was a shell, cold, empty but with potential. 

My eyes lit on the array of bizarre colours someone had thought a good idea - an electrifying orange in the kitchen, sugar pink and pale green and blues in patches in the children's rooms and very old, stained carpets that smelt of dog and held many stories. The remnants of someone’s life in colour and marks only. Then we discover there is no information about how their life ran. I’d left a manual in East street to oil the wheels – contacts and instruction booklets galore. 

The cold started to seep into our bones and then we discover the oil tank is empty, there’s no heating and the annexe which is heated by chunky gas cylinders is also reading empty. So, it was cold and not perfect but the new life began and mountain to climb emerged from the icy mist.