On beauty, Rightmove and not being an oligarch
(a kind of apology for silence)
Phew. I can breathe again. I can write again. I can start making plans. I can do these things because on Friday, fifteen minutes before the various solicitors’ offices closed, my partner and I exchanged contracts on a house.
I never understood those charts that put moving house right up at the top for stress - above divorce, a break-up or even having a baby. Anyone who has met me will have gathered that I know a thing or two about stress, including the kind that goes with job loss, cancer (twice) and an embarrassing pile-up of family deaths. But in my book The Art of Not Falling Apart I didn’t even mention the challenges of selling and buying a house.
I sure as hell would now.
For the past five years, my head has been full of houses. It started when my partner suggested I sell my flat and we buy somewhere together. My response was quick and clear. Are you mad? My flat, my beloved flat, was my pride, my joy, my hearth, my home. It was my sanctuary, my second skin, the place I escaped from the world, the place I worked, the place I marked the milestones of my life, the place my family came to for Christmas dinners and Easter lunches. Or did until there was no family to come.
My father was with me the day I saw it. He said: “I don’t think you’ll do much better than this” and I thought he was right. I still think he was right. There are silver birches in the communal garden. From my desk, I looked out at them. They reminded me of Sweden. They reminded me of my mother.
No, darling. I am not going to sell my flat.
Why, I said, thinking vaguely of Sunday supplements and Joanna Trollope, don’t you get a cottage in the country? And then we can do that thing everyone dreams of: divide our time between urban buzz and pastoral idyll.
As soon as he half-nodded, it was as if a gun had been fired. I was straight on Rightmove, scrolling through cottages in picturesque villages within relatively short driving distance of London. Location, location, location? Nope. It was more like pin a tail on a donkey. Green fields? Tick. Sheep? Tick. Lovely views? Tick. Pub in the village? Tick. Have either of us ever been anywhere near the place? No, but what does that matter when you’re buying a dream?
I found the house on Rightmove at 2am a couple of weeks later. Within 36 hours, we had belted up the motorway, in driving rain, to see it. We had fish and chips in the pub. Anthony offered the asking price on the Monday morning. A few months later, we moved in. The couple moving out had four removal vans. We had my Mazda MX5 with an airbed, a sleeping bag, two mugs and a kettle.
We filled it with furniture, much of it from local antique shops that charge a fraction of the price they charge in London. We found a local builder who transformed it. I’ve lived in flats since I was 23. The house I grew up in was built in 1964. The “period features” were Artex ceilings and an avocado bathroom. This house was built in 1700. It has a garden full of fruit trees and roses. It has a thatched roof, an inglenook and beams. It’s every city dweller’s fantasy of a country cottage and I’ve loved almost every minute I’ve spent in it.
I spent many, many hours looking for curtains. You think this is easy in the age of online everything? Please think again. We are not just talking a trip to John Lewis. We are talking combing the entire internet to examine the pros, cons, patterns and colour schemes of every single fabric in the world.
I’ve been down more online rabbit-holes than I ever thought existed. Garden furniture? There’s an awful lot of it. Sofa-bed for the study? Ditto. I understand now why people get addicted to online porn. Do I want to see hairy men flexing their muscles and other organs on the giant monitor on my desk? I do not. Do I want to see bergère suites and battered leather sofas? Now you’re talking.
I could probably have written several books in the time I’ve spent in the past few years mentally dressing and undressing houses. Because one was not enough. Oh no. Last year, Anthony and I semi-accidentally acquired a house in Umbria. I was born in Italy and for fifteen years, for the price of an extra bedroom in London, I’d had a tiny flat on a hillside in Tuscany. It was bijou. It was beautiful. It was a bit too bijou for two. The first summer of the pandemic, we drove out there and thought how lovely it would be to invite other people to share the beauty. Lovely, but tricky in a flat that’s 30 square metres. We decided to look for somewhere with a spare bedroom and a small outdoor space. What we found was a five-bedroom, two-kitchen house with an olive grove and a forest.
If only you could see a house, sign a form and Roberto’s your uncle, it’s yours. In my next life, I’ll be a property mogul or perhaps an oligarch, and that’s how it will happen. I’ll snap up villas and castles all over the world and fill them with gorgeous paintings and antiques.
In this life, however, things are a bit more complicated.
Italy is an incredibly beautiful country, with bureaucratic systems designed in Dante’s Inferno. There was, for example, the discovery that my Tuscan flat did not match the plan registered with the council. The only way to sell it legally was to (surreptitiously) move the wall, and kitchen, 32 centimetres to the left. This did not reduce the stress. It turned out, by the way, that the flat I had spent fifteen years paying for was a surprise birthday present for the buyer’s husband. Oh, and it took seventeen months to complete the paperwork for the house we were buying. Yes, seventeen. No wonder Dante talked about being lost in dark woods.
In February of this year, my partner and I were shivering in the Umbrian house. Who could have guessed that a house in the Appenines would be significantly colder than a flat on a gentle Tuscan hill? Huddled by the wood-burning stove and gazing out at the mass of brambles it was now our job to tame, we realised it was time to take stock. No, we were not oligarchs. No, we were not shit-hot corporate lawyers who bought each other properties as birthday presents. We were gentle, arty types who had somehow acquired the lifestyle of Goldman Sachs bankers, with three homes between us to run and maintain. But not, unfortunately, the Goldman Sachs salaries to pay for them.
It was time to trade down. It was also time to simplify. We have loved our adventure in the countryside. We have loved the peace, the beauty, the changing colours with the changing seasons. We have made wonderful local friends. We were extremely lucky that when the pandemic hit, and we had to stay in one place, that place was a haven with an outdoor space. I’ll be very sad to leave it. But I’m a city girl. My partner is a city boy. Life is short and I want to spend most of what’s left of it in the city I call home.
And so we’re joining forces to get a house round the corner from my flat. That sounds simple. It was not. I was gazundered, with the excuse, actually passed on by a solicitor, that my buyers had “misread the listing”. And on the day we were due to exchange on the Georgian house I had wanted to leave only in a coffin, Anthony’s buyer’s buyer pulled out. I had spent most of my waking hours for weeks planning the interiors. I had given away about two-thirds of my 4000 books to accommodate its huge windows and fireplaces. I had got rid of the beautiful furniture I knew wouldn’t squeeze in. I had thrown out my entire journalistic oeuvre. But in this country, nothing’s in the bag until you have that signature on a page. And we didn’t.
Now we do, on a different house. I’ve sold the flat I’ve lived in for 24 years. What’s left of my stuff is sitting in Anthony’s garage. Two weeks today, I’ll be back in Stoke Newington. I know where I’m putting all the furniture, obviously.
By the time we move, it will be seven months since we hatched this plan. Those months have been full of twists and turns, paperwork, cleaning, Hoovering, arranging flowers and smiling politely while wanting to yell: “what exactly is it about this stunning house that looks exactly like its photos that’s disappointing you?”.
I’ve learnt a lot about how people behave when a lot of money is involved. I’ve learnt that living in a beautiful space matters a ridiculous amount to me and that I can’t focus on anything much unless I do or know I will. And I’ve learnt, or been reminded, that if you want to change something big in your life, you have to roll up your sleeves, roll with the punches and keep going until it’s done.
Birmingham on Saturday
I’ll be taking part in the Birmingham Literary Festival on Saturday (7th October) at 1pm with Alison Jean Lester and Fiona Mason. We’ll be talking about our memoirs (including mine, Outside, the Sky is Blue) and also about grief. But I’m sure we’ll keep it relatively cheery. More information here.
Sky News
After three and a half years of doing the press preview from the comfort of our (in my case various) sitting rooms, we are now all back in the studio. This month I’ll be on on Saturday 14th and Saturday 28th. In November I’ll be on on Saturday 11th and Saturday 25th. After watching myself age live on Zoom, it’s nice to have proper hair and make-up. (You don’t need to subscribe to Sky to watch it. Sky News is on Freeview or you can watch the Sky News channel free on YouTube.)
Sunday Times book reviews
When not scrolling through Rightmove, I’ve continued to review books for The Sunday Times. Here are some of the books I’ve reviewed over the past few months.
More Substack newsletters to come!
It has been, I’m afraid, like not walking on the cracks in the paving stone. But now I’m back in the game/on the rails/choose whatever metaphor you like and plan to write a newsletter every week. Please let me know what you would like to hear about…
Great that you're nearly settled - or at least enough to resume your substack pieces.
Following what will hopefully be our last move before the care home, I reflected recently that despite some 14 moves in 35 years we'd only once had the stress of buying and moving at the same time - the moves have been into tied accommodation (as a missionary and then a vicar) and the purchases have only ever been of 'investment properties' we've let out to students or holiday-makers. But this final move into a 'forever home' (which sounds very like your erstwhile 17th-century cottage) has indeed precipitated a flurry of knocking down, refitting, nesting & general turning of a house into a home.
A year on and we're almost done! Now, just the very painful process of thinning out the excess piles of books, nik-naks, books, clothes, books and books! (so far I've only got rid of books I've also got electronically).
I wish you happy settling in Stoke Newington.