By

Craig Ennew

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One: Funky Little Shack

This week: the motivation behind the move.

Our neighbour sits on our sofa with a glass of Picpoul in one hand and her phone in the other. My wife has just sent her a link to a property on Rightmove and she’s frowning. “I don’t think I’ve got the right place,” she says. “I’m looking at a shack with a mobile home stuck on the back of it.”

“That’s the one!” we cry in unison.

Her husband takes the phone from her. He scrolls through the property details. “Really exciting,” he says. Someone needs to tell his face.

His wife waves her hand across our home. “So you spend a small fortune improving this place then, a few months later, you decide to move?”

She has a point.

She sits in the middle of what, a year earlier, was (for want of a better phrase) a shitshow. Last year, we had decided to “knock through” between our kitchen and conservatory. Richard, our builder, had been very accommodating until a stickler from Wiltshire building control pointed out that such alterations weren’t technically legal. By this time we had, of course, already knocked through. But legality was a minor detail, surely? Sadly not. The conservatory would need proper insulation, and a new roof with a skylight. Oh – and it would need steels to support the weight of the new roof. And a stronger floor to support the steels. And better foundations under the floor. In fact, Richard ultimately concluded, we’d do better to raze the crappy 1980s PVC conservatory to the ground completely, then start from scratch.

If you’ve ever seen that GIF of Popeye shovelling piles of ten-dollar bills into a furnace, you’ll have some idea of how paying for house improvements works. We hopped between credit card 0% deals with the agility of a mountain goat, albeit one that was heavily burdened by debt. What we did end up with, though, was a very smart new kitchen / dining/ chillout area looking out to the garden, where once the only view we had was a poorly-placed 1980s boiler.

The work completed what had become, in our eleven years there, a spacious and up-together Victorian semi in the heart of Salisbury. Four generous doubles, two en-suite, three reception rooms, a trendy olive-green fitted-kitchen, and a new roof to boot.

So back to the present and our lovely neighbour puts the phone back on the coffee table in front of her and folds her arms. “Anyway,” she says resolutely, “You’re not allowed to move.” The couple and their amazing family (including an entourage of exotic animals) had moved into the area shortly after us and we bonded over distanced glasses of wine across the street during the Friday “clap for the NHS” sessions over Lockdown. But, as lovely friends and neighbours as they are, the wheels of our move are in motion. We’ve found a buyer for our house two weeks after going on the market; and a day later, we’ve put in an offer on a bungalow in West Lulworth.

Such a move to the South Coast had been our topic of conversation for a while. But it wasn’t meant to happen yet. At 56, I’m too young and too strapped-for-cash to entertain early retirement. But as appalling as the thought of being an out-of-touch Grumpy Old English teacher standing in front of a squealing Year 7 English class may be, it is a muddy furrow that I must continue to travel. The dream of living by the sea and watching repeats of Pointless whilst sucking Worthers Originals would have to remain a dream.

Or so I thought.

A change of heart came about via our boy. His recent ADHD diagnosis meant that managing his transition into a suitable secondary school was always going to be tricksy. Our local secondaries just didn’t seem right – and who wants to watch their kid sink to the bottom of a big pond and never find his way up for air again? Then my wife came back after having a chat with a mate. The answer: a small state secondary school with a focus on land and animal management. Our boy’s dream school – it sounded perfect. Apart from the fact that said school was in Dorset.

I’m a glass-half-empty kind of guy, as my wife occasionally reminds me. “It looks amazing,” I said, scrolling through the school’s website. “But it’s bloody miles away.”

“They lay on minibuses,” she said, already determined to make this work.

Minibuses. A kid with ADHD travelling for over an hour each way on a bus. With other riotous kids. What could possibly go wrong?

But I shouldn’t have worried. Unlike my good self, my lovely wife is a solutions person. Within no more than a month, not only had she found herself a job nearer Dorchester, so that she could drive The Boy part of the way from sunny Salisbury; but she had gone even further in her planning, as she is always prone to do. We would all move nearer to Dorchester. And she even knew the exact village she wanted to be in.

West Lulworth. And once that was decided, she found us the shack.

© Craig Ennew, 2024

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