Ravendale House

You know when you make a decision to do something and just when it looks like things are working out as you planned you become overwhelmed by self-doubt? Are you doing the right thing? Could you do it different or better?

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It’s always good to start the year with a good news story, so here’s a small one to get things going.

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I thought I’d take this opportunity to have a look back at the year. In a nutshell, I think it would be fair to say it’s a year I wouldn’t want to repeat again in a hurry.

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Asbestos, “an extremely dangerous, highly heat-resistant, fibrous silicate mineral that can be woven into fabrics, and is used in brake linings and in fire-resistant and insulating materials“. Not the kind of thing I expected to be writing about in a gardening blog.

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When we lived at Ravendale House and it said on the news that the number of sparrows in the UK was falling, we used to laugh and say, “no it’s not, it’s just that they’re all living in our garden”.

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When I said in my introduction that I don’t have a garden anymore, that wasn’t strictly true. The temporary cottage does have a garden, but because we are renting and only for the 6 winter months, I don’t expect to be doing much work in it.

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‘Katie Weatherhogg’, if she actually exists, is a very popular person and much in demand. How do I know this? In the 9 weeks we have lived in our temporary cottage, we have taken more phone calls for ‘Katie’ than we have for ourselves, we reckon in the region of 40 or 50.

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I think I’ve watched enough episodes of ‘Location, Location, Location’ to know that house hunting is not for the faint-hearted. Hard work, if you do it properly, and even then often calling for shed loads of compromise. In other words finding your dream home is quite often just that, a dream.

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“It’s all in the preparation” or so they say. I thought we’d prepared pretty well, but even so the days following the move were weird.

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