Shaking things up.

So here's the thing. You know how you say: 'I'd love to live by the sea'. Or perhaps you don't. Perhaps you say: 'I'd love to open my own coffe shop or fashion boutique'. Or perhaps you'd rather keep pigs and knit your own lentils instead of sitting on a tube to a job in the City. Or perhaps you're entirely happy with your lot. If so, good for you and you might want to move to another blog.

But I am one of those people who has always wanted to live by the sea. Or actually, by water. A river would be very good. Possibly it's because I grew up right alongside a river and have been searching for home ever since.

Whatever the Freudian reason, it all came to a head over the August bank holiday weekend. We were visiting friends in the Isle of Wight, and we just said: 'What are we waiting for?? We don't love where we live. We don't hate it. It's nice. But it doesn't make our souls sing does it?'  We agreed that it didn't and that living next to a river/sea would give us the outdoorsy, sailingy lifestyle I(and apparently husband) hankers for.

And so, in true male fashion, my husband wasted no time, called estate agents and put our house on the market.

Insert screeching car noise here.


You see, we're perfectly happy here. I have finally made friends, the school is fab, we have the countryside on our doorstep. It's fine.

But it's not the sea.

So having signed a contract with an estate agent to say that 'yes please, we would love to sell our 300 year old thatched character cottage in the biggest recession of all time so that we can be homeless', we spent this weekend looking for a new home.

We went to Devon. In fact we went to Sidmouth, as we had been told by many people that it was lovely. And it is. So utterly beautiful that you want to rip the clothes off your body and run down the beach praising whoever is in charge of beaches. Except (and you can insert that screeching noise again here) that Sidmouth is populated with old people.

I am not ageist. But I do feel slightly intimidated by the fumes coming off the purples rinses. They are lovely. And slow. But lovely. But slow. And old. Did I mention old? Seriously, the stores (described as regency period) stock goods that are genuinely not far off that era. The restaurants serve food last seen in the late 60s and the service is so slow I expect most of their customers die before they eat.

Despite this, we fell in love with Sidmouth. We believe more property will come on the market if you wait long enough. Someone will die soon.

But then after seeing THE PROPERTY TO TOP ALL PROPERTIES EVER we were told that it has shared gardens and the owner was a complete knob who hated children and really we would hate living there (got to love honest estate agents). So we bid farewell to the views but thanked the agent for her tip to go see a village called... Situation X.... because I don't want to reveal it on blogland.

And we went there. And I found my spiritual home. It is so lovely. And everyone was just like us with kids like ours and it's commutable and involves sailing and has good schools and well just everything.

So now, having panicked about putting our house on the market in haste not knowing where we might move too, I now just want to sell and start our new lives next to a river, a spit from the sea living the dream life I've always wanted.

I feel all jumbly inside. This is all so sudden, yet not. Stay tuned .. I might have bought a luxury liner before the next blog post and have moved to Bali.