Tuesday, March 31, 2009
I'VE BEEN NEGLECTING MY BLOG!
Ok, I admit it - I've left my blog untended for far too long. Now the weeds have grown up, the dust has gathered, the doormat's knee-deep in junk mail and the fly posters have accumulated.
So, time for a tidy up and a bit of making good.
We moved from Essex to Norwich recently and it's come as a bit of a shock. Where we lived in Essex was pretty rural and our house was (is) a delightful Grade II-listed, timber-framed cottage in a former fishing village.
Anyway, my wife was head of department at a school in Brentwood, where she's been working for four years. It's what brought us up to Essex from Dorset. As I work from home and all my clients communicate with me through the 'net, it doesn't matter where I am based, although moving away from the south of England did put some distance between me and my sons. Mind you, my wife binned the application pack for the Essex school and I fished it out of the bin and encouraged her to apply, so I have only myself to blame!
So, after four years of a 70-mile commute, my wife felt she had taken the job as far as she could and it was time to look around for an assistant head's job. We'd got to know and love Suffolk during our time in Essex and were keen to see if we could relocate there. Try as she might, however, the right opportunity didn't come along, so we decided to cast the net a bit wider and bingo - a school in Norwich made her an offer.
Well, that was in June 2008. So we thought: we'll put the house on the market, which will give us three months to find a buyer, find a place for ourselves and get all the legal stuff done, before the new school year started in September. Ha!
An added complication: my mother was living with us, following my father's death in 2007. My mother has Alzheimer's disease. When my father died, she went to live with my brother in Switzerland initially, but on returning to England to give them a break, it became clear that her homeland was the best place for her, so she moved in with us. In a two-bed cottage that's not trivial and indeed it was the start of a difficult year. In preparation for moving to Norfolk, however, we agreed eventually that it would be best if my mother moved into a retirement home, which we found near Dereham. We had found a lovely old house in the area with an annexe, which we thought my mother could live in, but the consensus in the family was that this wouldn't work. Given the fact that we couldn't sell our house - or my mother's, which was rented out - it all became a bit academic.
No-one would buy the house or even make a half-sensible offer, so come September my wife started weekly boarding, staying in a shared house near work, while I soldiered on alone, except for a mid-week trip to Norwich to break the week up. Meanwhile, my mother was safely installed in a very nice and caring establishment, so although I didn't have to worry about her on a daily basis, it was hard not to escape the feelings of guilt that go with making such a decision, collective though it was.
After a few months of this strange and unsatisfactory existence, we decided to rent out our lovely old house and buy a flat in the city of light, calculating that the rent from the house would just about cover the mortgage on the flat.
And so it has come to pass that I now spend my days, weeks and months in a new-build flat on the site of a former shoe factory in a not-entirely-lovely part of inner-Norwich, near Mousehold Heath. Since the flat is not large, I have Christened it The Shoebox; it seemed right. On the plus side, I have managed to find some rough shooting already - something I never managed to do in Essex - and hopefully we will get our old motor launch out on the Broads when the weather cheers up. Should be less stressful than getting out and back on the same tide on the River Blackwater, hopefully - and calmer waters, too. The last two dreadul summers, when the wind never stopped blowing, put us off taking our 18 foot boat out - we're definitely fair weather sailors. Hell, before we moved to Essex, we weren't even sailors at all, but in our village, one of the first questions you were asked by new acquaintances was: So, when are you going to get a boat? So we did. More of that in another entry.
We live just 20 miles or so from my mother's home, so it's not too hard to visit her. I'm kind of flying the flag for my brothers, as they both live abroad (the other one lives in Melbourne), so we still tend to be pretty regularly involved in doing things for and with her.
But I do miss the country - a lot - and fear we jumped into buying The Shoebox too quickly, when we probably should have rented a cottage out in the sticks somewhere. Our dog isn't coping very well cooped up in a flat all day, either - she was used to popping in and out of the catflap the previous owner of our little wooden house had fitted in the small kitchen door you can see on the right in the picture, so she could lounge in the sun, harass bumble bees and bark at passers by. Looks like she's going to relocate to Dorset for the time being and live with my in-laws, where she will get good walks, a garden to mooch about in and be a 'Pets as Therapy' companion to my ailing father-in-law - and be fussed over by his carers. Actually, she's going to be better off than me!
It's true to say that Norwich is a very interesting place at its heart, but that attractive core is ringed by suburbs of unrelieved dreariness, with miles of unimaginative and depressing public housing. The exception is an area the estate agents Christened 'The Golden Triangle' and it took us a few weeks to work out where it is. Perhaps I'll look at it in more detail in another post. Anyway, there was no way we could afford to buy any kind of place there, not while we're still lumbered with what is now the albatross of our little Essex cottage. Did I mention it is now only worth what we paid for it in 2004 (maybe), despite the thousands we spent on it - including the acquisition of a strip of land to create a drive etc? So not only are we reluctant landlords, we're in negative equity as well! Ho hum!
Ok, I admit it - I've left my blog untended for far too long. Now the weeds have grown up, the dust has gathered, the doormat's knee-deep in junk mail and the fly posters have accumulated.
So, time for a tidy up and a bit of making good.
We moved from Essex to Norwich recently and it's come as a bit of a shock. Where we lived in Essex was pretty rural and our house was (is) a delightful Grade II-listed, timber-framed cottage in a former fishing village.
Anyway, my wife was head of department at a school in Brentwood, where she's been working for four years. It's what brought us up to Essex from Dorset. As I work from home and all my clients communicate with me through the 'net, it doesn't matter where I am based, although moving away from the south of England did put some distance between me and my sons. Mind you, my wife binned the application pack for the Essex school and I fished it out of the bin and encouraged her to apply, so I have only myself to blame!So, after four years of a 70-mile commute, my wife felt she had taken the job as far as she could and it was time to look around for an assistant head's job. We'd got to know and love Suffolk during our time in Essex and were keen to see if we could relocate there. Try as she might, however, the right opportunity didn't come along, so we decided to cast the net a bit wider and bingo - a school in Norwich made her an offer.
Well, that was in June 2008. So we thought: we'll put the house on the market, which will give us three months to find a buyer, find a place for ourselves and get all the legal stuff done, before the new school year started in September. Ha!
An added complication: my mother was living with us, following my father's death in 2007. My mother has Alzheimer's disease. When my father died, she went to live with my brother in Switzerland initially, but on returning to England to give them a break, it became clear that her homeland was the best place for her, so she moved in with us. In a two-bed cottage that's not trivial and indeed it was the start of a difficult year. In preparation for moving to Norfolk, however, we agreed eventually that it would be best if my mother moved into a retirement home, which we found near Dereham. We had found a lovely old house in the area with an annexe, which we thought my mother could live in, but the consensus in the family was that this wouldn't work. Given the fact that we couldn't sell our house - or my mother's, which was rented out - it all became a bit academic.
No-one would buy the house or even make a half-sensible offer, so come September my wife started weekly boarding, staying in a shared house near work, while I soldiered on alone, except for a mid-week trip to Norwich to break the week up. Meanwhile, my mother was safely installed in a very nice and caring establishment, so although I didn't have to worry about her on a daily basis, it was hard not to escape the feelings of guilt that go with making such a decision, collective though it was.
After a few months of this strange and unsatisfactory existence, we decided to rent out our lovely old house and buy a flat in the city of light, calculating that the rent from the house would just about cover the mortgage on the flat.
And so it has come to pass that I now spend my days, weeks and months in a new-build flat on the site of a former shoe factory in a not-entirely-lovely part of inner-Norwich, near Mousehold Heath. Since the flat is not large, I have Christened it The Shoebox; it seemed right. On the plus side, I have managed to find some rough shooting already - something I never managed to do in Essex - and hopefully we will get our old motor launch out on the Broads when the weather cheers up. Should be less stressful than getting out and back on the same tide on the River Blackwater, hopefully - and calmer waters, too. The last two dreadul summers, when the wind never stopped blowing, put us off taking our 18 foot boat out - we're definitely fair weather sailors. Hell, before we moved to Essex, we weren't even sailors at all, but in our village, one of the first questions you were asked by new acquaintances was: So, when are you going to get a boat? So we did. More of that in another entry.
We live just 20 miles or so from my mother's home, so it's not too hard to visit her. I'm kind of flying the flag for my brothers, as they both live abroad (the other one lives in Melbourne), so we still tend to be pretty regularly involved in doing things for and with her.
But I do miss the country - a lot - and fear we jumped into buying The Shoebox too quickly, when we probably should have rented a cottage out in the sticks somewhere. Our dog isn't coping very well cooped up in a flat all day, either - she was used to popping in and out of the catflap the previous owner of our little wooden house had fitted in the small kitchen door you can see on the right in the picture, so she could lounge in the sun, harass bumble bees and bark at passers by. Looks like she's going to relocate to Dorset for the time being and live with my in-laws, where she will get good walks, a garden to mooch about in and be a 'Pets as Therapy' companion to my ailing father-in-law - and be fussed over by his carers. Actually, she's going to be better off than me!
It's true to say that Norwich is a very interesting place at its heart, but that attractive core is ringed by suburbs of unrelieved dreariness, with miles of unimaginative and depressing public housing. The exception is an area the estate agents Christened 'The Golden Triangle' and it took us a few weeks to work out where it is. Perhaps I'll look at it in more detail in another post. Anyway, there was no way we could afford to buy any kind of place there, not while we're still lumbered with what is now the albatross of our little Essex cottage. Did I mention it is now only worth what we paid for it in 2004 (maybe), despite the thousands we spent on it - including the acquisition of a strip of land to create a drive etc? So not only are we reluctant landlords, we're in negative equity as well! Ho hum!
Labels: Alzheimer's, Norwich, reluctant landlord
