Yesterday morning I read a piece by the legendary fashion stylist Grace Coddington about her country life in the Hamptons. She lives in Wainscott, which I guess is a little off the ritzy path of places like South and East Hampton, though I’ll admit I don’t know all that much about The Hamptons. Still, the way she described her life there it did sound idyllic: grocery shopping for lobster in a farm shop called Loaves and Fishes; dinner at Sant Ambroeus, neighbours like Calvin Klein and Bruce Weber.
So there I was reading all this thinking how absolutely bloody lovely it all sounded, when I thought: hang on a minute…this does not sound like country life at all. Certainly not country life as I know it. Where’s the talk of mud? And roadkill? And the fact that the best coffee you’ll get in the sticks in probably from a Starbucks machine inside the local Esso garage.
Which is why I felt compelled to write today’s post. Because everyone, it seems, is suddenly moving to the country. They’re cutting out the ‘suburban’ middle-man and instead going from full-on urban to turbo-country overnight.
So if you are tempted by the rural life I’m hoping today’s read might be vaguely helpful since it’s everything I wish I’d know before we made the move.
I was 35 when we packed up by the way, meaning this month marks 10 years of country living. We live in east Kent, which is not desolate country country, but it is wild and there are fields as far as the eye can see.
Why did we make the move so early? The simple answer was after eighteen years of living in London, I was over it. The noise. The dirt. The attitude. I also hated where we lived. We couldn’t afford to buy anywhere remotely nice, and so ended up in the sort of grim London suburb where everyone gets overexcited about rumours of a Costa coffee shop opening. (It was a false alarm. They never did.)
Like a lot of Londoners we lived in a cramped apartment that we had far outgrown but which we had been lucky enough to buy with some money left by a distant spinster aunt. (I adore a spinster aunt). It was on the brow of a hill far too far from the nearest train station which meant getting home at night was a toss up between sprinting the vertical mile home from the station whilst risking being mugged by a 12 year-old on a bike. Or spending a fiver on a mini cab where sexual impropriety always felt like it was on the horizon.
The final straw came when our downstairs neighbour was hit over the head with a glass bottle by, you guessed it, a 12-year old on a bike. I mean, I always dreamed of doing the honours myself, but still..it felt time to leave.
But where to go?
‘We are not moving to the suburbs,’ my husband declared. I agreed.
Suburban living made me think of cafes with fairy lights (although, I’d have killed for one of those in south east London); competitive parenting and swinging at the weekends. (I’ve zero idea where any of those baseless prejudices came from but still, they existed nevertheless.)
I grew up in inner city Manchester. My husband in Tunbridge Wells. Neither of us had any idea about what country living might entail. All we knew was that we wanted quiet, a star- filled sky and somewhere were you could hear the owls at night.
And so one day we drove down to the farthest reaches of Kent and bought the first property we viewed. It wasn’t that the house was especially beautiful, but it backed onto fields, you could hear sheep bleating in the distance and the sky looked about as big as I had ever seen it. We were sold.
Since this month marks our decade-long move to the country I wanted to share with you all the things I’ve learned and all the things I wish I’d perhaps known. That’s because moving to the country is not easy. That’s why people move to the suburbs first and from there, edge their way to the countryside, decade by decade. Of course some people do what we did and leap right in, but most of those have leaped straight back out again terrified by village produce shows and the sheer number of Union Jack flags in windows and gardens.
By the way, this post is in part inspired by an utterly brilliant one by
a few weeks back who appears to live in the deep deep country. Some of her observations are different to mine but very good and very true and I can’t recommend it and her enough. You can find it hereSo…things to know: