BY THE time you read this, I will have taken up residence in Fort Knox. Picture the scene, as I peer over the ramparts of 400-odd cardboard boxes like a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, waiting for the Indians to arrive. Or the removal man, more probably, bearing scissors with which to rip into the packing tape.
A day away from collecting the keys to a new house in the country feels like a historic moment. It has certainly been a long time coming. We’ve been looking for years, scouting around the Borders for a place we could call home. Big houses, but-n-bens, “projects” with character, and new-builds with none, we have kept an open mind. Nothing, however, seemed quite right. Were we like those fusspots on Location, Location, Location, who are impossible to please? We began to fear so. But in that time, during which we collected enough property brochures to wallpaper a ball-room, we slowly came to realise that estate agents have been right all along. In the best and the worst of senses, postcode is key.
In the early days, it was a breezy adventure. Our idea of where we wanted to relocate was romantic and impractical. There was a cottage, on a one-track road, with acres of land, and an owner whose enthusiasm for getting back to basics had led him to strip back the plasterwork, revealing pipes and cabling and air-vents. From the outside it looked like a place where Richard Hannay would have felt at home. The interior, on the other hand, resembled a grungy loft in New York. Then there was the house so stuffed with furniture the front door was barricaded, and we had to enter by the back. Or the one, in the wilds, where we were asked if we’d mind keeping up the transport museum in the garden shed. Or the Galloway man who, after a demonstration of the oil-fired central heating went wrong and it threatened to explode, was obliged to phone an emergency heating engineer. As he waited for help to arrive, my husband was turning green from the fumes and looked as if he was going to be sick.
But my favourite, until now, was a remote old smiddy, whose owner replied to a postcard put through the letterbox, asking him to get in touch if he ever wanted to sell. For a moment, it seemed he did. Then the feeling passed. It was a beautiful little place, too, deep in the Border hills, but at night you would have stepped out into darkness blacker than a mine, and in the worst of winter, it was completely cut-off.
Property-surfing is a national addiction. The day we put our flat up for sale, various friends got in touch to wish us well. They weren’t planning to move, they said, just keeping tabs on the market. And what a welter of advice we’ve been given. It would seem everybody is an expert. We were instructed when to sell if you want the best price, and when it’s cheapest to buy; what you shouldn’t worry about, and what is absolutely essential; the prime spots, and those to be avoided like a malarial swamp. Nobody mentioned, though, that November and December are a good time to search.
As we’ve come to appreciate, in almost every respect the Borders are hard to beat. After viewing a handful of bijou places in what we now think of as Eye-Watering East Lothian, houses in the vicinity of Peebles and Melrose, Galashiels and Selkirk are just about affordable. As is the case anywhere beyond the central belt.
At our stage of life – a point somewhere between The Darling Buds of May and Last of the Summer Wine – one’s nearest and dearest seem rather too keen to hint at impending mortality. We weren’t looking at places with staircases, were we? And was there a grocer’s within fifty yards of the garden gate – and for that matter an A&E?
If this hunt has taught me anything, it is that you cannot future-proof every aspect of your life. The place we have found – a late-Victorian cottage joined to an old cobbler’s shop – has sheep and horses at the bottom of the garden, and a view of hills we can climb from our door. From the moment we walked in, we felt at home. It’s not perfect, but it is wonderful.
For those living in the peaceful west, moving house is said to be the most stressful event after bereavement and divorce. No wonder. Choosing a new home means finding somewhere in which you can be completely yourself. It is your second skin, your haven, the place that, hopefully, will become dearest in the world.
So now we have found it, all we have to do is unpack. With Christmas approaching, and snow forecast, well-meaning friends have asked if we’ll be making the place festive with lanterns and fairy lights, and putting up a tree. The more urgent question surely is, can we find the duvet?
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