Ravendale House

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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There’s been a lot in the news recently about energy companies and their charges for providing us with our power. Here is my small, slightly off-topic contribution to that debate.

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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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Having lived at Ravendale House, with a large garden, for 15 years, I think it would be fair to say the most unusual creatures we saw in all that time were a few Shield Bugs (Palomena prasina) and a Lousy Watchman (Geotrupes stercorarius ). The latter giving me quite a scare when I bumped into it whilst weeding. We’ve only been here 2 weeks, and I can already trump both of those sightings.

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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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Thursday September 12th dawned foggy and damp. Completion day was here at last, but first we had the small matter of a floor to mend. We were up and out of the door by 6.30am, well it wasn’t like we could have a hot drink or anything!!

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We left Ravendale House around 11pm hoping the flooring would have dried out by the morning. All we wanted now was a sit down and a cold beer. All thoughts of a hot bath had been banished some time ago because the oil wasn’t being delivered until the next day, so no hot water.

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The day before the move I had defrosted my ‘new’ fridge for the first time. I thought I’d been pretty diligent in mopping up the water but apparently I hadn’t been diligent enough.

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