Real life | 5 May 2016

Buffy Sainte-Marie said it best. ‘The lights of town are at my back, my heart is full of stars./ And I’m gonna be a country girl again.’ At least, I hope I am. But if I do manage to pull off this long-awaited move to the country, it will all be thanks to a Spectator reader.

It was years ago now, I had a very nice letter from a gentleman who lived in the Surrey village of Ripley, about ten minutes from Cobham, who recommended that I move there. That must have been stored away in the annals of my brain, but deep in the annals, because, after scouring Cobham and finding nothing I could afford, it still didn’t occur to me.

I went way down the A3 and looked for land around Farnham and found a cottage with no central heating and one acre for £720,000. But the agents wouldn’t give me the time of day, because they were so confident they would get that price or more.

And then I popped down the road to Ripley to go to the small supermarket there, as I often do. I’ve been there a hundred times and never seen anything up for sale. It’s a one-street village with a vast green behind the main drag, hidden from view. But this time, I parked my car round the back of the shops and saw a cottage for sale right on the green.

I made an appointment to look round, and as soon as I walked in I felt it. Unfortunately, I had taken the ex-builder boyfriend with me, because the agent had told me it needed ‘a bit of work’. And the builder boyfriend didn’t feel it at all.

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As I walked round going ‘Ah! I can put the piano here!’ and ‘Oh! A kitchen up some steps! I lived in a cottage with a kitchen up some steps when I was a student!’, the builder grumped and groaned, opening doors to rooms then shutting them again declaring, ‘Don’t even go in there!’ He pronounced the bathroom a natural-history project and recommended we alert David Attenborough to the things that were growing between the tiles.