Real life | 27 August 2015

On the basis that I might need a new boiler soon, I thought I had better sell the London flat and move to the Cotswolds.

Fine, so it wasn’t just the gurgling noise coming from the Potterton Performa. I had been pondering my place in the world, which is never a good thing for a person of my nervous disposition to do. The break-up with the builder boyfriend; the escalating cost of keeping three horses in Surrey; the liberal leftie south London neighbours regaling me every time I leave my house with the words ‘Isn’t Jeremy Corbyn wonderful?’ — it was all making me feel perfectly unstable, as if a big move was the only thing for it.

I can’t be doing with this madness, I thought. I need to sell up and go somewhere quieter, saner and less expensive. Somewhere I might be master of my destiny, with my horses on my own land and my nearest neighbours not spouting their devotion to a bearded Trot who wants to take Britain back to 1975.

So I went on Rightmove and a few taps later there it was: a lovely little house with five acres and stables in the Cotswolds. I keep typing Cotsworlds, by the way. And that may be Freudian in what it reveals about my motives for retreating to a corner of Oxfordshire where no one might ever find me again.

Also, the place was in David Cameron’s constituency, which I profoundly believed would mean that no one could put a high speed railway past me nor dump 2,500 houses down next to me, two things which are happening respectively where my parents live in Warwickshire and where I keep my horses in Surrey. Surely, a few miles from the PM’s constituency home I would be about as safe as I could be anywhere because I’m fairly sure all governments are NITPMBYs — Not In The Prime Minister’s Back Yard.