Why I Left the Countryside

Or, what you learn from everything not going to plan

Ten days ago I threw a final bin bag of odd assortments into my car, started the engine and drove from West Sussex to London. The bin bag was one of about ten bags, forty boxes and a moving van full of furniture that had made that same trip over the past three days. Eight months after I had left London in a blaze of excitement and freedom, I was returning and the question everyone asked was, why?

Neuroscientists will tell you that one thing the human brain loves is certainty. We like to see things in black and white, to know for sure that things are how they are. It’s why when things change or we are faced with a period of uncertainty, we often find it hard to cope. Personally, I think it’s why the idea of marriage became so popular and divorce was so frowned upon - “till death do us part” doesn’t leave much room for changing your mind.

This need for certainty can be a beautiful thing. It keeps us hunting for the truth when we’re met with lies, it encourages us to make big commitments and then keep to them even when things are tough but it all can also feel unyielding. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to get trapped in certainty.

When I decided to leave London last year I wasn’t certain that I was done with it - I told everyone that I wasn’t “leaving” so much as “taking a sabbatical” - but I was certain that I needed a change. I’d bought my flat seven years before and during Covid I’d shared it with my partner. When that relationship ended, the flat felt different. Almost stagnant. It didn’t feel like the sanctuary it had been when I’d first bought it and I was craving something else. I wanted space, fresh air, new people. I wanted change not certainty. What I hadn’t planned on was quite how much uncertainty was going to be thrown my way.

I know everyone wants to know why I came back to London but before I launch into that, here are a few things I loved about living in the countryside.

The peace - my little cottage was located in a hamlet with about twelve other houses and a pub. That was it, nothing else. It was so quiet! Everyone knew everyone else and would say hello when we bumped into each other on a morning dog walk but beyond that there was just silence. I don’t think I heard anyone screaming at anyone else the entire time I was there, it was very good for my nervous system.

The woods - if you’d asked me before I left I would have told you that I was always happiest by the sea. That’s still true but walking in the woods every day gave me a new appreciation for the world around us and how much we manage to ignore every day. I swear my eyesight changed and I started noticing colours that I hadn’t previously seen. I found myself able to identify the smells of different trees and the temperature of rain drops. They woods took me out of my head and back into the world around me.

The people - the first week I moved to the country I ordered three “dumper bags” of logs for my fire. They arrived and I realised that a “dumper bag” was not just a country version of the blue Ikea bags, as I had thought, but instead a measurement of weight - one tonne to be precise. Three tonnes of logs sat on my front lawn for 24 hours while I tried to figure out how on earth I would get them round to the wood store at the back of the house. And then the next morning I came out of my front door to find my neighbour loading the logs into his wheelbarrow so he could bring them round for me. This typified the behaviour of everyone I met. The yoga class that bought everyone Christmas cards, the local farm shop who would always carry my order out to the car, the random woman who sold me a chair on Facebook marketplace and when she discovered I was new to the area wrote me a list of places I should visit.

The food - while London might win on restaurants, the countryside wins on actual food. I barely set foot in a supermarket when I was there and yet my weekly shop was no more expensive than it had been in London. Bread was freshly made, milk literally came from the cows in the field at the end of my road. Vegetables reminded me of the ones my grandfather would grow at the bottom of his garden, the flavours richer, earthier and a million miles away from anything wrapped in plastic.

So why did I leave this Good Life idyl?

The Cottage: as some of you might know, I didn’t do a lot of planning before the move and ended up hastily taking a cottage just so I had somewhere to live. If I’d thought about it, it did seem to be very reasonably priced for the size and location and it quickly became apparent why. The cottage was owned by an English woman living in LA. She’d seen the cottage online during Covid, fallen in love with it and bought it without doing too much due diligence as to the state of it. I can’t say I blame her for this, it’s the sort of ridiculous thing that I would do if I had the funds. However, if you’re going to rent out your property, you need to be relatively sure that it’s in good working order, this one was not.

On the day I moved in, I discovered that the shower, loo, fridge and oven didn’t work. The whole house had a layer of grease and dirt across it. On the second day, the extractor fan fell off when I tried to switch it on and I discovered the oil tank (which ran the heating and hot water) was nearly empty but unable to be filled because it was so overgrown. At the end of the first week, plumbers came to see if they could get the shower and loo working, in the course of this the hot water tank in the attic flooded and water started pouring through the light fitting in my bedroom, covering my bed in very rusty water. Later that day the plumbers found a dead bat in the bottom of the tank.

This was how it carried on for the time I lived there. I don’t think there was a month which went by when something didn’t break. The big deal breakers for me were: the coldest weekend of 2023 when the temperature in my bedroom was well into the minus figures and then the boiler broke. It took four days for a plumber to be sent out. A few weeks later, I was going down the stairs when the bannister came off in my hands and I ended up falling down the rest of the stairs and twisting my ankle. As I sat at the bottom of the stairs, I realised I had had enough of managing someone else’s renovation project. Particularly as I had my own property problems going on.

My flat: when I’d left London, I’d rented my own flat out. My plan was that if I loved country life I would sell it and buy something out there but I didn’t want to go all in until I was sure. For the first three months this was easy, I heard nothing from my tenant and all seemed well. Then one Friday I got a text message informing me they had come home after a week away to find mould growing on the walls. Over the weekend, more and more mould appeared until it was on every wall in the flat. I let the managing agents know and they sent their plumber round. It turned out that the bathplug had come away from the pipework, so that every time my tenant took a bath or a shower, the water ran straight under the bath and had subsequently spread across the entire flat, where it had stayed while the plasterboard walls had sucked it up before turning mouldy.

A full inspection found that the property was going to need to be emptied, dried out and then completely rebuilt. All the flooring, the kitchen and the bathroom were going to have to be taken out and I was looking at about six weeks of building work and a bill of around £50,000. This was made worse by the fact that for the first few weeks it looked as though my insurance wasn’t going to pay for it and I would have to find the money myself. Not only was I terrified by the sheer scale and cost of the project (the closest I’ve ever got to DIY was painting one wall in my bedroom) but I felt immense guilt that I’d somehow let this happen to my flat. The place that I’d been so proud to buy, that had looked after me so well when I’d lived there, and now it was literally a shell of its former self.

My tenant moved out and eventually the insurance agreed to cover most of the repair costs. It took four months to get to that point and work started on it this week. I knew I’d have a better chance of the work going well if I could be nearby and check-up on it regularly, so I’m currently living in a friend’s flat in the same building. I also knew, however irrational this sounds, that I wanted to make amends to my flat. I didn’t want to rent it out and risk it being damaged, I wanted to move back there, spend time in it and be grateful for it. Is it forever? Probably not but it feels right for now.

My dog: a few years ago a meme went round which stated, “I’m only working so I can buy my dog a garden.” As someone who is obsessed with their dog, I thought moving to the country would be the best thing I could do for her. I thought she’d love having her own garden to potter around in, that she’d be delighted by the extra space and the country walks. I was wrong. My dog, it turns out, is very much a city bitch.

On the first day we moved there, she went in the garden, saw a toad and ran straight back inside. That pretty much summed up her attitude to the garden for the entire time we lived there. She hated moving from our open-plan apartment to a house that had actual rooms, which meant she couldn’t always see exactly where I was and would follow me from room to room just in case I went into one and never came out of it. I also hadn’t taken into account how tough stairs would be on her old, mildly arthritic bones. Each morning she would stand at the top of them and look at me miserably, as if to say, “don’t you know how tough this is on my legs?”

She wasn’t even that keen on our walks. While she loved going to the beach, she could take or leave the woods and only really got excited when we went to the deer park because it meant she could roll in deer poo. She was not delighted about having to take a bath on our return.

Since we’ve moved back to London it’s become clear to me just how much she missed it. It’s like she’s had a new lease of life since we’ve come back. She zooms out of the flat each morning, desperate to go for our regular walk so she can sniff all her favourite spots. Each day she goes wild when she sees the local dog walker, bounding over to him and demanding treats (even though she won’t actually go on a walk with him). On the first day back, she dragged me into her favourite coffee shop and revelled in all the attention she got. She is so delighted to be home. Is it madness to revolve your life around a dog? Probably. But she’s happy, so I’m happy.

The other things: there are other more practical reasons for our return to. I missed my friends. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more loved than when I moved out of London. Friends gave me beds to sleep on while I found somewhere to live. They sent Rightmove suggestions and messages of encouragement. And when I moved into the cottage and everything started to go wrong, they sat on the phone with me as I cried. When my flat flooded they sent gifts and letters. They travelled for hours to just come and hang out with me. Every day I was reminded how lucky I am to have such great friends, and I started to realise how hard I had made it to see them. Even the ones who live outside London, it was always easier to meet in London because it was central for all of us. I missed their physical presence. I’m sure in a few months I will be complaining again about how I never see any of them but for now it’s nice to feel they are close.

I also realised how much my work still relied on London. Most of the delivery of my work is online but the connections, the meetings, the “quick drink” to establish a relationship, those things became increasingly difficult. I found myself trying to book twenty meetings on one day or having to cancel a meeting due to illness and then not being able to get it back in the diary for months. I literally wrote the book on working from home but only working from home proved hard.

And finally, I missed the energy. When I left London I was exhausted and the pace of it was grating on me. I would get angry at the pushiness of people, the cars revving their engines outside my window, the constant change of it all. A few months outside of London gave my body a reset. I slowed down, I slept better than I had done in years, I rested. And that rest gave me a hunger for the sense of opportunity and newness that London brings. When I left London I think I was tired of both the city and of life, it took property resting for me to be able to appreciate just how much it has to offer.

Just after the leak in my flat had been discovered and while the boiler in the cottage wasn’t working, I booked a tarot reading to see if a deck of cards could make more sense of my life than I could. The day I had moved out of my flat had been the hottest day of the year but since that point it had rained pretty much continuously and to emphasise that point, every card she drew seemed to have some connection to water. I told her about the flood and the guilt I felt at abandoning my flat. Maybe, she said, it needed to happen? Maybe the water flowed so that what was there could be washed away and you would be left with a fresh start.

Does that mean I should go back to London, I asked?

The cards are showing change, she said as she laid them out. But what that is, isn’t clear. Right now it’s just about being with the unknown.

When there’s no clear direction, you have to do the thing that feels right in the moment. So I did the thing that might lead to being called “flaky” or “uncommitted” and I chose to go home. For a while I was scared that people would judge me for it, that I had failed in some way because I couldn’t make it work as I’d wanted to. Was I giving up when really I should be gritting my teeth and pushing on? I don’t think so. When I think about it now, the conclusion I’ve come to is: good idea, wrong time, bad execution. It showed me how capable I can be when things go wrong and what amazing support I have around me if I will only lean on it. It taught me that the point of change is not to create more certainty but to show us that we don’t need all the answers before we can make a move, sometimes we can just trust ourselves to be ok in the unknown.

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