Is this the same thing?

I find it strange how the media seem to think that the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Trump are somehow related.

Last June, I voted to leave the EU.  I didn't do it because I believed that immigration was wrong - I actually believe that in manageable numbers it's a good thing.  I didn't do it because I felt I'd been left behind by the political class - I've had a very good and very lucrative career, thank you.  And I didn't do it because I was persuaded by a particular newspaper - I don't read them.

I did it because, on balance, I felt that the EU had become an organisation driven by principles that I don't share.  An organisation run by political appointees, rather than democratically-elected, accountable representatives.  An organisation that gives too much space to lobbyists, that listens too much to commercial interests to make rational decisions that are truly good for the people of Europe.

No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.  I don't doubt that there are any number of politicians out there who actually try to bring their idea of "good" to the people they represent.  However, I don't believe that companies or corporations can do the same thing.  Companies exist to make profit for their shareholders, and everything they do is about maximising that profit.

And when they get big enough, and influential enough, they use that influence to try to steer government policy.  And with Europe, they can steer twenty-eight governments at the same time by influencing directives, which then have to be enacted in national laws..

I don't like that.

And having worked in the finance sector for the last thirty years, I was rather surprised, to say the least, that the former PM of Luxembourg, that little country of 600,000 (very rich) people, should be the consensus candidate for President of the European Commission a couple of years back.  Here was the man who had - in 20 years as Luxembourg's Minister for Finances - steered the little country to its position as the top tax haven in Europe.  And this guy was the best that Europe had to offer?  Or did it have something to do with the influence of all those global multi-nationals whom he had persuaded to store their money in the Grand Duchy? And when I heard his eve-of-the-referendum comments on the possibility of any future renegotiations (it was de Gaulle's "non" again) I didn't even need to answer the question for myself.  I voted Leave.

Mr Trump, however, is altogether another matter.  

Try as I might, all I can see is somebody who thinks that running a country is the same as running a corporation.

It isn't.

In a corporation, you only hire people you think will succeed, and when they don't, you sack them.  Countries have a lot of people who will probably never succeed, but you still have to provide for them, because you can't sack them.

The tragedy for me is that Trump managed somehow to persuade those people that he - the man who seemed to take pride in the fact that he had paid very little in tax for the last 20 years - would help them.  Paying tax actually means helping other people who aren't as lucky as you are.  If you're a sentient human being then you'll see it that way.

So for me, voting Leave in the U.K. does not make me a Trump supporter.  The real problem for the people of the US, as I saw it last November, was that the only alternative to Trump was to vote for Hillary Clinton.  I was a big Bill fan (after all, he played the saxophone) but in this case I think I would have had to vote for None of the Above.

Six months along the road

The first day of October...

It's now a whole six months since I hung up my suit (or more precisely, commited six suits to the large metal bin at the recycling centre and put the best two into a black dustbin bag in the spare room for posterity) and waved goodbye to the profession that I had followed for thirty-something years.  Today is, I think, Saturday, which would have meant something to me once.  Saturday was, for me, the second day of the weekend, the one before Sunday, which was increasingly depressing because at the end of it the weekend would be over and I would have to kiss goodbye to Patricia and disappear to London for four days.

I don't know why my mind keeps on focusing on that, because life is so very different now that all of that professional stuff seems like a life on another planet.

So how are the days now?  I get up, usually, sometime between seven and nine, depending on how much sunlight is coming through the bedroom window.  Down the stairs, ruffle Lola's tummy as she rolls on her back full of excitement because the day has started at last, put some bread in the toaster, some water in the kettle, switch on the espresso machine and wait for electricity to do its job while we see to breakfast for the cats. 

Breakfast is usually in the garden, either out front if the sun is beckoning, or under the parasol / umbrella on the terrace if it isn't, and Patricia comes and finds me with her first coffee of the day and we contemplate what is to come.

And at some point, during the day, the dog gets a walk, the shopping gets done, usually combined with a visit to the tip with a sack or two of garden rubbish, the work of the day is accomplished (or from time to time not, as the case may be) dinner is eaten and digested and the evening ends in a mental catch-up on the events / successes / failures of the day, before a glorious eight hours or so of sleep.  And in the words of Scarlett O'Hara, tomorrow is another day.

Despite that sounding like a very leisurely existence, we've accomplished a bit these last six months.  The front garden, which used to look like this:

now looks more like this:


and the part of the back garden that was once rather worse than this:
now looks like this:

and the Lola that looked like this:

now looks like this:


and a hundred other things are a little bit nearer to fruition, if less visible.

Life is, slowly, moving on.

One day in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to satisfy ourselves with worrying about a little bit of maintenance, or planting / tending to / harvesting something that has grown in the garden, or painting, or making music, or reading, or walking the dog, or just doing "nothing", but for now that is still some way off in the future

It's a journey that has its ups and downs, like all journeys, but it is, inexorably, getting there, and the steps along the way bring a lot of pleasure, punctuated by the antics and interactions of Djé, Pastelle, Jazz, Java and Lola.  All that I can say is that life, now, seems to have a lot more purpose than it did when I took the train to London every week, and a lot more fulfillment, albeit it can be physically hard sometimes, but it has a lot more enjoyment too.

And sad Sunday evenings are no more, a thing of the past, forgotten in the annals of time.

Lola !

A few pictures of Lola from her first few months with us.  Here she is at 8 weeks on 29 December, her second day with us, still holding onto a rag that carried the smells of her mother and brothers and sisters.  She weighed in at 6.1kg...A week later, 9 weeks and 7kg, her ears still very floppy, but that character starting to develop in her face...

...but still very much a baby.  Yawning and then..

falling asleep on the kitchen floor.

9 1/2 weeks, 8kg now, and starting to get interested in the cats

11 1/2 weeks, and 11kg, all that growing can make you very sleepy.

13 1/2 weeks, off the lead in the fields on top of Withycombe Hill, 13kg now and starting to look more like a young dog than a puppy from time to time.

The same day, on Minehead beach, starting to practice her "wolf" look!

A few weeks later, 16 weeks old and out on the hills again. 18kgs now and growing very fast indeed.

At 20 weeks, Lola is 21kg and starting to look like a young adult, with a very mature look in her eyes as she surveys the mess she's made of the front garden.

Still practising the "wolf" look, and it's getting convincing now.  At 22 weeks and 24kg, it's starting to be a struggle to lift her in and out of the car.

Amazing how a five-month old puppy can look like a fully grown dog - but she's still got a lot of growing to do to catch up with those paws. 23 weeks and 24.6kg, slowing down a little...

...and enjoying her morning walk up on the hills.

Two weeks into a new life.

A slightly different place to be at eight in the morning than sitting in front of a couple of screens in the city...

This is a rather nicer way to start a Monday morning, up on top of the hills with the dog, enjoying the April sunshine.

It's two weeks now since my last day in the office, two weeks so far to get used to not being compelled to be somewhere at a certain time.  To not have to shave, not have to put on a suit, not have to do anything because I'm being paid to do it.  Freedom.

So far, it feels pretty good to me.  The last couple of days, lots of physical work to do, shifting a ton (literally) of floor tiles, cutting a 100ft, ten foot high privet hedge, turning a huge mess of pyrocantha, bay laurel, jasmine and cotoneaster into shredded pulp.  My hands are burning from all the thorns, my back is aching from moving the tiles, my legs are bruised from pressing against the step-ladder, but it feels really good all the same.

Maybe I'll tire of it in another thirty years or so...

Finally did it.

My retirement drinks...

I think it's going to take me a little while to understand that I won't be going to work any more...

In October 1977, I started my first real job, working for the National Trust on a job creation scheme.  I spent six months cutting away laurel undergrowth in a large pine forest on the hillside between Selworthy and Allerford in the Exmoor National Park. For eight hours a day, we hacked and we sawed and we built ten foot high raps of cut laurel, and I spent my weekly wages in the pubs of West Somerset and on keeping my  motorbike on the road.

That was over 38 years ago, and that's quite a long time.  Long enough to change career direction a few times and eventually to find a niche somewhere that was not too trying and that more than paid the bills.  Yep, I know I'm lucky, and I always have been, on balance.  I sometimes think I must have been built that way.



But anyway, here I am. Retirement.  A little early, but retirement all the same.

To me that word  - retirement - sounds like two things: old age and pottering about.  So either I am older than I think, or I need to change my ideas.  Or find a new word that means what I think the word "retirement" should mean when it describes me.   I'll have a think about that one.  And before I can potter about, there's some real work to do, renovating the house and fixing up the garden.  A couple of years probably to get it all done properly.

But in any case, the day has finally come... and gone.  Although technically I am still employed and on holiday until 13 April, I've had my last day in the office, handed back my mobile device and my security pass.  That career that I've been working at these last 30 years or so, it's over.  I am no longer Chris the MD, I'm just Chris again.

It's a wonderful feeling - a mix of freedom, relaxation and excitement.  Let's see what happens next!

Countdown to a new life

It was August 2011 when the seed of an idea germinated that turned into a four-year project.  We were living in our town house in Bordeaux - Ticia and me, along with Lucie, who was soon to start the final year of her degree at the University of Bordeaux.

Having finished all the renovations three years before, we'd been enjoying the fruits of our labours in terms of our immediate environment, the house, the courtyard.  I'd been making music in my studio in the basement, Ticia had been getting more and more involved in an organic lifestyle, trying to make our food, the products we used, as natural and as harmless and as effective as possible, whilst producing the occasional painting in her own studio, her atelier, in the converted attic space.

I would catch a plane to go to work in London most Monday mornings, and return early Friday evening to spend a weekend writing music, eating (and sometimes cooking) the latest inventions to issue forth from our kitchen and our imaginations, and generally enjoying the city life and the seasons in the south-west corner of France.

The only real problem was money.  Life was very expensive.  In addition to a mortgage on the house in Bordeaux, another on the apartment in La Rochelle we hadn't yet managed to sell, and the rent on a flat in Earls Court where I stayed during the week, there was the cost of my flights every week and the expenses and upkeep of three properties, two of which were lying empty.   But still, if all we wanted to do was keep that lifestyle going, it didn't really seem to be a worry: debts built up over the course of the year and then in February, a hand reached down from somewhere, lined the bank account with a bonus, and everything reset to a little above zero again.

So life was bumbling on in a comfortable kind of way, and then two things happened that made us reconsider.  One - Lucie decided to move in with her boyfriend and we realised that, if we had seen her being at university in Bordeaux as a reason for us to be there, that reason was gone.  And then in the same week...

...in the aftermath of a storm that lasted just half an hour, the road in front of the house was flooded with water that rose up out of the drains as the underground system overloaded.  And it flooded the basement, where I had built my music studio, again...  After the first time it happened, back in 2008, I was always a little wary of having my gear down there, with all those electrical connections.  This time I started to get depressed about the whole idea. If it had happened twice, it would happen a third time, and a fourth...

The two things together - Lucie checking out of home and the wet basement - catalysed our thinking, and over the next few weeks a plan emerged.  We'd sell the house in Bordeaux, and the apartment in La Rochelle.  If possible, we'd sell the house in Sonnac too, but that was more of a difficult one to find a buyer for.  In any case, we'd pack up all our stuff, and we'd move to England, where - if we had just one house and one mortgage and no rented flat, and if we watched out for the pennies a little - we could think about me taking early retirement.

As the plan hatched, and then developed, I worked out that the date of my retirement could be three years after we sold the two properties in France and bought a house in England.  We put a big effort into advertising and selling the apartment in La Rochelle, and by the following spring, we'd found a buyer.  After that it was time to try to sell the house in Bordeaux.  That took a little bit longer. After a lot of promising starts that came to nothing, and a big part of the summer spent installing Lucie in an apartment in Toulouse,where she had been accepted for a Masters degree, we'd still not found a buyer by the time our plan reached the next stage - moving over to the UK to start out in rented accomodation.  But in December, two months after taking up temporary residence with Djé and Pastelle in a freezing cold flat in Porlock, we found a buyer for the house and set about our own search in the UK in the run-up to Christmas.  And in the last week of February 2013, we completed on the purchase of Vexford House, and there we were.

And as the plan said, three years after that date, I could retire from my job in London...  And here we are, we've been in the house for two years and nine months, and I have just 16 weeks of work left to go...

It is going to be strange to stop.  OK, I tried it eleven years ago - I gave up work, and for eight months, I stopped living by the clock, but that was kind of different and life was complicated.  This time, everything is more simple.  And giving up work is for real, it's based on a stronger financial position - I can't wait.  It's not that I don't enjoy what I do - sometimes it can be really quite fulfilling.  But ask me whether I really want to get myself out of bed at 4am on a Monday morning to get myself to the station for the early train to London, ask me whether I can truly be bothered about what the audit trail of my sales activity looks like on the management information systems, ask me whether I truly believe that what I am doing is bringing people a better future.  Much as I am sure somebody, somewhere would like me to say "yes" to all those three, the enthusiasm and the belief are starting to wear a little thin.

It's said that as we get older we get more cynical about things.  I don't really want to think of myself as a cynic - a sceptic, yes, but not someone who has no faith in anything.  All the same it does seems to me that a lot of what I hear from a corporate level these days has a bit of the unreal about it.  I have a picture in my head of increasing stress in the system, in me, in those I work with, in the whole environment.  A few years ago, people were far more relaxed.  The working day had some holes in it - for example when travelling to and from client meetings, or when entertaining, or being entertained.  These days the ubiquitous iPhone or Android or Blackberry is always there, always alive, always giving you that guilt feeling - the vaguely uneasy realisation that someone is watching you.  There is no escape, and unfortunately, we're not actually paid more for the added burden or stress of being permanently connected by the technological umbilical cord to the office.  I feel quite sorry for those in the generation after me.  They will likely never know the feeling of freedom that we had in the past, the space that existed for those of us who were prone to laziness.  There is no opportunity to be lazy these days.  And that's a shame, because some of my best thinking - professionally speaking that is - probably came from those moments of idleness.

I pick up a Times from my hotel reception each morning I am in London, and I attack the crossword on the tube.  The stress of the coming day is there, in my head, and sometimes I find it really difficult to make those lateral connections, to solve those left-field clues, on the way to work.  But coming back in the evening - if I feel I've one a good day's work - the answers seem to flow out of my pen without thinking a lot of the time.  It's because I've switched off, and I can free my thinking and get it away from that structured, time-constrained pressure that is the working day.  Periods like that used to happen within the working day too, but now there is no time - there's always a list of goodness knows how many things that shout for my attention in my inbox.

The stress in the corporate system is increasing.  Everyone has to become more efficient and more productive every year, or - well - the system doesn't work.  Because there isn't often much focus on investing to grow the business - now it's all about maximising existing assets, and if possible, stripping the asset base a little.  And those assets, in a business like the one where I work, are the people.  So much so that there is (I discovered last week) a "human capital committee" in my organisation.

For me, the rather nasty inference of that title - the "human capital committee" is that the capital belongs to the firm, in the same way as financial capital or intellectual capital.  I rather prefer to think that my own "human capital" belongs to me, and that if I choose to, I can rent my skills to an employer, but I never become a part of their capital - I never become a part of their balance sheet.

OK, so I agree, it's not a nine to five job.  We get paid a lot of money in the city.  But this relentless grind upwards in terms of activity levels, technology, efficiency, connectivity, productivity, it can't go on for ever.  Something, somewhere has to crack.  Either it's the people, because they are pushed too far, made to run too fast, or it's the company itself.  And if the company cracks and the profits fall, then the market will beat up the share price, and there'll be cutbacks and down-sizing and more efficiency drives, and a proportion of those people - even the ones who didn't crack under the pressure - will be out of the door and on the market again.

I'm not saying that life in the finance industry has not always been very competitive and relatively high-risk in terms of job-retention in the bad times.  But things have changed a lot over the past five years or so.  It's like those dustbin men in France.  I'm sure that ten years ago, they could walk around the city, lobbing the bin bags into the back of the lorry as they made their measured way around a familiar route with the lorry keeping up with them and following their pace.  Clearly the demands from management to squeeze more collections into an eight hour shift have increased, because now, those bin men seem to spend the entire day running in order to keep up with the progress of the lorry.  So where once the lorry was a useful tool for them - effectively their servant as they went about their business of cleaning the city of waste, now the lorry is the tyrant and it inflicts its hard regime on the bin-men, who are forced to run in order to a) keep up with it, and b) keep their jobs.   And that is pretty much exactly my picture of the asset management sector now.  Where once, the company's progress and velocity was the result of its collective employees' individual progress with some benefits of synergy, now the company says what it is going to do, and God help the employees (and the share price) if they don't keep up with the corporate forecast. 

All I can say to that is thank God I'm retiring next year.

And yes, the weeks tick by... 

As I'm eating my breakfast on a Monday morning, I usually write Ticia a little note to leave under her laptop on the kitchen table.  Around two years ago,  I started noting down how many weeks remained until i could give up work - so the number was around the low 100s.  And now, it's down to just 16... March 2016 is D-Day - or maybe R-Month would be a better description.  In any case, the tax year 2016/17 will see me return to being a basic rate taxpayer for the first time since about 1990 I think. 

There's loads to do for a couple of years anyway - finishing off the earthworks in the garden, and getting on with the house, which has been somewhat neglected over the first three years, apart from the bathroom and our bedroom, which is still not finished.  But also, I'm going to spend a certain amount of my time meandering round the country lanes on my bike and getting fit again, writing some new music (God I'm bored with all that stuff I did in 2009-2011!) - yes there will be time for all of that, and maybe even time to spare.  After all, if you can get by on a limited income and be wide awake and healthy, then what is life but to be enjoyed?.

Come on, March 2016, I'm ready for you

Wherever I lay my hat

Here's where it all began for me, one chilly March morning back in 1960.  I see the sign outside says "deliveries only", well I was one of those.  Delivered at 6.30 in the morning on my Mum's birthday.  She always says I'm the best birthday present she ever had - not sure if I agree with her there...

Crowborough War Memorial Hospital

My mum and dad took me home to the house where I lived for the next twelve years, Greenways, Luxford Road, Crowborough, which didn't look much like this then...

Luxford Road, Crowborough, Sussex

When they bought it, the year before I was born, for £1,800 (imagine...) it was called No.1 Something-Or-Other Villas, but it was the next-to-last house in the road, with a nursery behind its 200 foot garden and fields across the road, so they called it Greenways.  It was a three-bedroom semi with a separate kitchen and larder, which we had knocked into one when I was about ten.  The garden might have been 200 feet long but it was only as wide as the house, so our balls kept straying into the neighbours gardens, much to their annoyance.  I think the record was four gardens away - that one we never got back because there was a miserable old woman with a bulldog who lived there.  And next door, after my best friend Mark and his family moved to a big house on the other side of town in 1964, was a landscape gardener who toiled for many years (in vain, I might add) to repair the long privet hedge that separated our gardens.  Poor chap, but as far as I know he still sends a Christmas card to my mum every year.

When I was 12, we upped sticks and moved to Porlock in Somerset, after we'd fallen in love with Exmoor during a week's holiday at Dunster Beach.  We sold Greenways for £9,995 and bought Worthycote for £8,500 (I remember these things...).

Doverhay, Porlock, Somerset

This became the family house for the next 16 years, although I only lived there for the next seven, after which I went off to seek my fortune in the big city.  Worthycote was another semi-detached, but a fair bit bigger, with two rooms on the second floor, that we always referred to as the attic, even though there was a proper staircase that led there, and a window on the landing that can be seen from this picture.

To start with there was no road down the side of the house, there was the local butcher's slaughterhouse, from which came the most horrendous noises on Mondays.  It was a place of life too - the butcher kept horses, and he boarded racehorses there off season.  there was nothing my dog Danny liked more than to leap up against the seven-foot wall that ran down the side of the yard and nip an inquisitive horse on the nose.  Below the back garden there was an orchard, also belonging to the butcher, and we could walk down through it to get to the recreation ground, which is where I spent every minute I could in my early teens, playing football or cricket with the village lads, or practising my putting on the little green that was once there.  This house was also the next-to-last in the street, but in this street what came after the houses was a very steep hill to Worthy Combe, which led up on top of Exmoor.

Across the road there was a farm, owned by the National Trust, but run by three ageing sisters, Dorrie, the oldest, who walked with two sticks and really did hold her coat together with bailer twine, Clarrie who was in the middle, and Sylvie, who was the youngest sibling, but probably still about 65 when we arrived.  They also had a brother, David, who had a farm down on the marshes, and he came by from time to time to deliver stuff because none of the sisters had a car.  They all spoke in voices reminiscent of a Monty Python housewife, went to bed at about eight o'clock in the evening and were up long before I was in the mornings.

And then someone in the district council decided to zone the butcher's orchard as development land.  He retired gratefully rich to dedicate his time to hinting with the Devon & Somerset Staghounds, and fifty-seven terrraced houses were built between us and the rec, in a development that became known locally as White City.

The building work was still going on when I left home, and after a brief six-month stay in a chalet in Minehead, I found a job working for a bank in London, and another job as "village caretaker" for a place called Little Berkhamsted about twenty miles north of London in the Hertfordshire countryside.  The advantage of the second job was that it came with a little one-bedroomed cottage, no.7 Church Road, attached to the end of the village hall.

Little Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire

Well, it might look pretty, but I can honestly say that I have never lived in another house, before or since, that was as prone to ice on the inside walls in the winter.  It had a tiny living room, ten foot square, and a tiny bedroom the same size upstairs.  That tiny bedroom soon had a double bed and a cot in it, after my son Ben was born, And it also had a rather unstable ceiling in the living room, and about a quarter of it fell down on our heads one evening.

After three years of permanent fan-heaters, which eventually necessitated a third job - this time playing four nights a week in a band based over in Romford - my first real relationship came to an end, and I headed off from Hertfordshire.  After a couple of months sleeping in an armchair in my guitarist's terraced house in Romford I quit the bank and joined a professional band.  A spell in Munich followed, after which I found myself in Edinburgh, where the band had picke up a residency at a night club.  It lasted for about six months, playing six nights every week, but in th end the band and I decided that we were no longer right for each other, and I looked around Edinburgh for something else to do.  Six months of unemployment was followed by a job selling cars at a city-centre garage, following which I somehow landed a job in a stockbroker's office and my new career was launched.  After a couple of years of renting and living with my girlfriend's parents, it was time to be a homeowner for the first time.  And the first ever true "chez moi" was a two bedroom flat, 4 Cleikiminrig, Edinburgh built by Barrett Homes, on the outskirts of the city.  It cost £25,500 and came complete with a fully fitted kitchen and a little postage stamp of a garden at the back.

Cleikiminrig, Edinburgh

Not only did I have a brand new house (or rather flat), I also had a brand new car - a Fiat Uno.  All on credit, of course.  The finances were helped somewhat by supplementing my salary with playing in a band three nights every week.  Firstly in the working mens' clubs around the city, but later we graduated to the hotel circuit, and got a residency at Gleneagles, where amongst others I met Ringo Starr and Diana Rigg.  We also backed Bob Monkhouse in cabaret once - and I was hugely surprised to find that his real-life stage show was a hundred times more funny than I ever thought he was on TV.  If only I could still remember the jokes...   

And then, alone again, and I decided to chance my luck back in the big city down south.  The flat was sold for exactly the same as I'd paid for it, and I was on my way,

After renting a completely unaffordable bungalow in Wadhurst for a few months, the next house that had my name on the deeds was a two and a half bedroomed semi detached bungalow in Crowborough.  Back to my roots...

Western Road, Crowborough, Sussex

Alvern Hay, Western Road, had front and back gardens and big 16 foot square kitchen diner, and a garage!  Not that it was very useable, for some reason there was always a lake inside it, even in the summer.  But in the end it didn't stick around very long, because after the stock exchange crash and the hurricane (now that was something...) I was soon on my way to the Isle of Man.  And on the first visit there, I fell in love with a bungalow overlooking the sea.  Alvern Hay went after just nine months, and Gulls Way, Croit-e-Quill Road, Isle of Man became the new residence.

Croit-e-Quill Road, Isle of Man

This is the view of the back of the house.  It cost just £1,500 more than the place in Crowborough.  The electric door on the garage was a bit of a novelty, as was the 1/3 of an acre of garden, complete with palm tree and fish pond on the seaward side, that fell in a steepening slope and seemed to end in the sea, a couple of hundred feet below.  Unfortunately, interest rates chose that moment to rise to 15%, and the fuse under the keg of gunpowder called finances was lit.  Despite those interest rates though, the Isle of Man was becoming a very desirable place to live for people selling their businesses and avoiding capital gains tax, and house prices rocketed.  Just two years after moving in, it sold for 50% more than it had cost, and in the resulting downsizing operation, I signed the conveyance on a house that included a covenant forbidding the production of alcohol on the premises.

Converted Wesleyan Chapel, Isle of Man

No.2 Wesley Court, in the same street, was half of a former chapel, that had been converted using lots of the wood from the original pews.  It was a strange, quirky place,  The sale was agreed with the vendor, who was leaving for South Africa in a hurry, on the day it was first advertised in the local paper.  Two weeks from offer to completion.  The kitchen and living room were both 23 feet long by 8 feet wide, and there was a big entrance hall in between them.  It was a bit like living in a succession of railway carriages, until you looked through that big round window on the first floor landing.  But it did have one problem, it didn't have a garden, and after Gulls Way, that was a bit of a drawback.  Still, it was only ever meant to be an interim home, and six months later it was sold again, and a little house in the country, south of Peel on the other side of the island, became home for the next ten years.

Patrick, Isle of Man

Hillside View was a little two-bedroomed cottage with a pokey donwstairs bathroom in 1990, with a flat-roof utility at the back and a flat-roof conservatory at the side, and it sat in a quarter of an acre.  In 1997, an extension was built - the part on the left of the picure, which doubled the living space to 1,800 square feet.  A deal with the local farmer added about a third again to the garden.  By the time it was sold, the whole of the downstairs was a split-level open-plan arrangement ending in a 20'x16' sitting room with a modern inglenook fireplace and six big windows around it.  In fact, if I'm counting right, there were 23 windows in all, and four external doors.  It was a very bright house.  it was noisy though - cows, sheep and crows formed the dawn chorus and they kept it up all day long.  But I really loved that spot in the country, looking out across the hills, where I headed on my mountain bike at every available opportunity.  It was sold to a director of a building firm when it was time to say au revoir to the Island and head back to London.  And in Tonbridge, 30-odd miles south of the big smoke, something very different awaited...

Mortley Close, Tonbridge, Kent

Two houses in fairly rapid succession, in fact, and next door to each other.  The first was a three-bedroom terrace in Mortley Close, bought in 2001.  The four bedroom end of terrace house next door was more attractive, but at the time it was being used by the builders as their showhouse, so was off limits.  Six months later, it went up for sale and was promptly snapped up,  The three-bed sold and the four-bed house was bought for 10% more.  It was a much bigger house, with a big L-shaped living room on the first floor overlooking the river and a 24 foot kitchen big enough to house a sofa in the bay window at the end.  Of course, it didn't have a garden to speak of, just a bit of grass on the river-bank to hoover once in a while, so a static mobile home in the Cotswolds became the weekend haunt in the summer, but it was a nice place to live, close to the town centre but quiet all the same.  I was always worried about the river, and the possibility of flooding, but it didn't happen in the two years before a change of plan resulted in a move to France, and a temporary end to the day-job.  Why France?  Well, it was cheap, to say the least... and the proceeds from the house in Tonbridge brought some interesting possibilities for a change of lifestyle, even if there was a biggish mortgage to pay off.

6 Rue Basse, Sonnac, France

After all, where else could you buy two houses, a walled garden, with a big barn and a big double garage for less than £100,000?  Unfortunately, the description "habitable" means something rather different when applied to a house in France that what it might mean in the UK.  For example, it had two WCs. The main one sat over a big tank in the cellar, that needed to be emptied by the local farmer with his dung-spreader every ten weeks or so, whilst the other one, in the bathroom, was equipped with a macerator unit that sent the waste the same way as the bath-water.   Some weeks after moving in, I noticed some relatively macerated toilet paper flowing down the gulley that ran between the house and the road, before passing beneath the roadway in a little culvert and emerging as a "stream" on the other side, next to the garage.  On tracing it back, I realised that it came from the loo in the bathroom. Hmmm.  French country plumbing, top notch stuff.

In any case, I wasn't there very long, because life was turned upside down, and after a few months living in the little house rather than the big one, I met Patricia, and moved my world and my piano to an appartment in La Rochelle.

Rue Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, La Rochelle, France

A fourth-floor appartment "sans ascenseur", which means that the 76 steps up to the front door kept me relatively fit while we were living there.  On the fourth floor, you could leave the french windows between the bedroom and the loggia open all night, all summer long.  The mosquitoes were too lazy to fly up four floors, they preferred things at grass level down below.  The night-time noise of various neighbourhood cats was quite off-putting from time to time, but it was really handy - a big supermarket car-park behind the building which made parking very easy, and the supermarket was pretty useful too.  And my bike, which was parked down in the cellar, was easy to get out for a sunny ride along the cliffs at L'Houmeau, or over the bridge to the Ile de Ré, or across town to Les Minimes, the "port de plaisance", a huge marina around the coast from the old port.  And sitting out front of a café down  by the old port, watching the world go by, was a favourite occupation too.  I was flying to London and back every week.  To begin with I drove to Nantes and caught a 7am flight, but then Air France stopped their flights to London from regional airports, But after a while, I even got used to the foibles of Ryanair, flying from La Rochelle.  But after a few short years, we hatched a new plan.

From time to time I flew from Bordeaux instead of La Rochelle, because the flight times were more convenient - there was an early-ish morning flight instead of late afternoon.  If I did that, Patricia would drive me down the 150kms for my morning flight - the airport was on the city's ring-road or rocade - and then drive back to La Rochelle, coming to pick me up on my return later in the week.  Except one Thursday when I was coming back there was snow everywhere so I said I'd get the train home.  That meant catching a bus into the middle of Bordeaux city, and what I saw pretty much took my breath away.  I couldn't stop raving about it.  We'd been thinking of finding a house to buy around La Rochelle instead of the appartment, but the prices there were a bit eye-watering.  Then we discovered that Bordeaux was about 30% cheaper, and we decided to go and have a look around.  The very first day, we found it.  In the Rue Lecocq, about 500 metres from the cathedral and the Hotel de Ville but a relatively quiet setting.  A stone-built terraced house with a courtyard at the back, a cellar, a convertible attic and 12' high ceilings.  It had been inhabited by an old lady whose son had already retired.  It was advertised as "habitable" but I'd already learned what that meant.  In reality it was a big renovation project, but it became a labour of love which took a year or so to get finished.   

Rue Lecocq, Bordeaux, France

And there we would have lived for a long time, had it not been for two or three events that started to make us nervous.  One, the cellar, which I'd fitted out as my music studio, was flooded by the efffects of a big summer hailstorm in 2008.  Two, the financial crisis arrived later that year and the pounds I earned to pay the mortgage and other expenses with were suddenly worth 30% less in euros.  Three, another summer storm in 2011 flooded my studio once again.  And the cost of it all began to stop making sense - I was never going to be able to retire if we stayed where we were.  And from somewhere hatched a plan of self-sufficiency or as near to it as might be possible, and in the autumn of 2012, we left the house empty, apart for the furniture, and started our search for a house in the south-west of England.  Three months later, armed with a signed compromis de vente for the house in Bordeaux, we agreed to buy Vexford House, and started on our plans for the house and the garden.

Vexford House

And here it is, and there's a whole blog about it here:  http://vexfordhouse.canalblog.com/




As long as you understand French...