I have not posted a blog for more than a year. That may have something to do with our decision to move to somewhere hundreds of miles away from my beloved London. I used to write something every day, perhaps adding bits to my two novels in progress, writing a poem, or doing a blog. In twelve months all I have written is one bad poem The cause was not the well documented "writer's block." It was paralysis. I was so stunned after we had moved, I sometimes found it difficult to cross a room. To sit down and write would have been impossible.
It is well known that moving house is traumatic. I suppose I should have known that doing it at the age of 78 would be exceptionally traumatic. I had no previous experience of how it was likely to be.
We decided to move out of London to somewhere quieter, more suitable for a retired couple. I had always dreamed of living out my last days sitting in a sunlit garden overlooking the sea. However, as I am more than a decade older than my lovely wife, we decided we ought to move somewhere where she would have family support when I shuffle off, though please note I have absolutely no plans to do so yet.
So we looked at the map to find somewhere near my wife's sister. This led us to Frome in Somerset. Neither of us had ever been there. We booked a week's holiday in an apartment overlooking the river, on an unpleasant modern estate which we did not much like. However, we had a couple of excellent meals in town at the George Hotel and one at the Corner House. We discovered a pub called the Olive Tree which had an attached Thai restaurant where you could eat in the garden.
One morning my wife and her sister went off for a shopping day in Bath, leaving me to my own devices. I wandered into a part of the town a bit away from the centre and discovered a maze of narrow cobbled streets, with boutique and vintage clothes shops, a proper butcher's and an ironmonger where I am sure Ronnie Barker would have been able to buy forkandles. Not a chain store in sight. A vegetarian café with a secluded garden, known as the Poetry Café. And pubs. I love traditional old fashioned pubs. Frome has more than several. I was walking down a cobbled hill to see if it might lead me back to the town centre. Two elderly men were toiling up the hill towards me. Frome is quite hilly. They stopped in front of me, struggling for breath. One of them asked me "Are you a man who appreciates a good pub?"
"Yes I am," I replied.
"Then you ought to know you have just walked past the best pub in Britain."
"Really?"
"Yes. We've come on a day trip from Yeovil just to have a drink or two in that pub. Come on, turn around and see if we're right." Thus I discovered the Lamb and Fountain in Castle Street.
The following day I took my wife on a walkabout of the older streets of Frome which you do not see if you are driving through. I did not take her to the Lamb and Fountain. It is not her sort of pub. But she was enchanted by the old town and we decided to move to Frome.
We made 2 further trips to Frome, staying at the old fashioned, comfortably friendly George Hotel, while we looked at houses. Having discovered that our little terraced house in Walthamstow was worth double what we had paid for it, we realised we would be able to buy a much more impressive house in Frome. We selected a couple on the internet, either of which would have impressed our friends and family and taken all our money. Fate saved us. In both cases, having come all the way from London and booked into a hotel, we received a call from the agent the night before viewing, telling us the property had been sold. We decided to buy an 18th, 19th and 20th century cottage (it had been added to twice in different centuries). It was run down but cheap enough that we decided we could use the profit from our London house, to make the house exactly as we would like our home to be. Three months later we still have builders and an electrician in every day, but it gets better and better. The decaying conservatory has become a new living room. The garden is a pleasure to sit in in the evening. Next week the trellis will be attached to the front porch for the wisteria to climb. Four brackets will be attached to the outer walls of the conservatory, with two at the front of the house, ready for flowers to cascade down from hanging baskets. We have a fitted wardrobe in our newly decorated bedroom. A free standing wardrobe would have toppled forward. The floor slopes away from the wall. The wall could be described as a bit curly. We like it.
We are on the edge of town, next to an industrial estate. The estate has everything you could possibly need, carpets and flooring, a bathroom centre, Homebase, Sainsbury's, Pizza Hut, a carphone warehouse, a wholesale draught cider warehouse. You name it. It is there, somewhere. And in this industrial estate there are buddleia covered in butterflies, and hedges of rosemary.
If you walk seven minutes through the industrial estate, you are in Sandy's Hill Lane, a peaceful green country road, dripping with blackberries and rosemary, with views of the Mendip Hills and almost no traffic. So I am beginning to forget the depressing trauma which enveloped me like a black cloud of gloom when we first came here. I kept asking myself when are we going home? Only there was no home. It had gone. I became paralysed with utter misery.
But now, after three months, I am a happy Somerset man. I was a runner up in July in the competition to decide the Frome Festival poet laureate. I am looking forward to the September meeting at the Poetry café.
But I shall return to London for National Poetry Day at the Royal Festival Hall on October 3rd and hope to see some of my London poet friends. Yokel though I am fast becoming, I shall keep popping up in the Smoke from time to time.
