Real life | 3 November 2016

For three months after I move to the country, I am told, I am going to be in the most almighty panic.

I will ask myself repeatedly what on earth I have done. I will have sleepless nights worrying that I should never have left London. I will wake in a sweat in the early hours gripped by the idea that I cannot possibly survive now I am not ten minutes’ walk from the Northcote Road.

And then, magically, one day, about three months in, I will wake up in my country cottage and look out of my bedroom window at the sea of green and say, ‘This is the best decision I have ever made.’

I’m really glad a few friends who have done this move have talked me through it, because I panic at the best of times. So the scale of the panic I will have after selling my flat to move to a cottage near the horses is likely to be monumental, cataclysmic, thermonuclear.