Dispatches from Daisy Barn

A new adventure begins

We finally arrived last night at about 8pm.

Bella had been poorly overnight on Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon I was worried enough to take her to the vet. They are always so polite when they gently imply that I have overreacted to a jippy tummy. But they gave her something to stop throwing up, and a probiotic to help put her right.

All the while, I was still waiting for the final, signed tenancy agreement. It was April Fool’s Day - had I indeed been a fool? It finally came through, somewhat at the last minute, late on Tuesday afternoon.

By Wednesday morning, Bella was still not 100% so I waited to see if her tummy cheered up enough to put her through the 2hr 30min drive. In any event, I was still packing what I thought we’d need for the first 48 hours or so in our new home - coffee machine, towels, food supplies - and with whatever leftover boot space there was I wedged in a few of my Wisley plants.

[ Don’t worry, I pulled over to take the picture ]

We were driving west, into the setting sun, by late afternoon. By the time we reached the hills and dales of the North Cotswolds, we were racing the most vivid, pink sunset towards the barn. We arrived just as that blast of orange and rose was melting away into night, with a perfect crescent moon hung above the barn as if an angel on a Christmas tree. The sunset and the scenery reminded me so much of my Dad. I put on some Elton John as we drove on.

The landlord met us, showed me how to turn on the hot water, and showed me where the oil tank, boiler, electric metre and underfloor heating controls are. I was paying little attention, honestly, because I was starving.

Emma Bridgewater (well, Evri) had been due to deliver plates, bowls and mugs just before we arrived. Alas, they were a no-show. I also had forgotten to pick up the dog bowls before leaving. Thus it ended up with Leo and Bella having their supper served to them in my Joseph Joseph stacked mixing bowls and me eating Daylesford ready-made spaghetti and meatballs out of the pan.

The man and van due to deliver my sofa today has said he now can’t manage it until next week. The chaise arrives tomorrow, God willing. I managed to fold and fit my deeply unchic Dunelm outdoor table and chairs into the car and (priorities) a pretty tablecloth I bought from a pop-up shop last summer to jolly it up (remember how I told you never to buy a tablecloth? Do as I say, not as I do). Aside from the beds, which were already here, they are currently my only furniture.

Going to bed last night in an empty, echoing, strange house I was a touch apprehensive. Bella was up three times in the night, again. But, with my hoe still safely in the car boot, I was also excited for what the morning would bring. Gardening and, with any luck, some fucking plates.

Since seeing the house and starting the process of renting it, I have thought most about one thing - sitting on the grass with a cup of coffee in the morning, basking in the sun. I adore my London garden (and I’m already missing my tulips, though I’ll see them again in a couple of days) but there is no grass for lolling around. And that is what I now have in abundance. OK, so I can go to Clapham Common to loll but it’s not the same. There are so many other people there. And I hate them.

So, we woke up, made coffee (because of course the one thing I did remember to bring was my Sage Bambino and the best coffee beans in London) and soon were lolling.

Then, I went for a run - well, a sprint really. Bella found a hole in the fence through which she could get into the sheep field abutting our garden. The poor sheep, losing their woolly heads, were unsure whether to be more afraid of the small, fearsome, surprisingly aerodynamic dachshund, or the screaming hag wheezing after her howling “BELLAAAAAAAAA NOOOOO COME BACK HEEEEEREEEEE FUCKKKK”.

After that sudden burst of exercise, it was back to lolling and eating half of the packet of KitKats I’d brought ‘in case of emergencies’ (not even the two finger ones, the FOUR finger ones) while flicking through Jo Thompson’s lovely book.

At lunchtime, my aunt and uncle arrived from Bristol with a picnic lunch, plus plates, cups and a thermos of coffee. These people know moving house. In his various careers working in business, at the EU, as a parish priest, as the Interfaith Advisor to Church House, and many, many others, my uncle (and my patient-as-a-saint aunt) have moved approx 50 million times. Across the world and back again, around the parishes of England and back again, here and there in London, then Wiltshire, then Wales and back again. Anyway, they knew exactly how to save me from myself and my bumper packet of emergency bumper KitKats.

We sat in the sunshine and ate sandwiches, and then my uncle – the patriarch of our family’s gardening WhatsApp group, the OG gardener – dug a hole to see what lay beneath the top soil. Despite being unimpressed with my smart, new Japanese spade – the fact it was pointed rather than squared off was troubling to him – he made quick work of digging a very neat, deep hole in the lawn.

It actually is clay! Like, clay-clay. The kind you make pots with! The ground is made of THAT stuff. While I understood this in theory, seeing it and touching it suddenly brought home the significance of soil. Well, because it isn’t soil! It’s CLAY! As in, make-pottery-out-of-it clay. How on earth does anything grow delicate roots into that claggy-one-minute-bone-dry-the-next mess?

My apprehension deepened when we then filled the hole with water. I cannot stress this enough: it did not drain out one cm.

Wow, I have really, really been in baby school, gardening in my London raised beds with what is just bags and bags of compost, thinking I was so clever when everything grew beautifully - well, shit. Now I’m taking an advanced degree with nothing but my playschool doodles and my poster-paint splattered smock to prepare me.

When my darling aunt and uncle left, I had to go in search of a Diet Coke to cure my deep, deep craving. Left the Diet Coke in the fridge in London, didn’t I? Google Maps told me there was a SPA 10 minutes away but it turned out to be a corner shop in the middle of a vast, pristine, new build estate. Being both obviously not a local, and covered in clay, I couldn’t bear to go in. We kept going – now with no destination in mind.

After a while of driving – including past two vast quarries – I typed ‘supermarket’ somewhat desperately into Google Maps and, lo! As if to answer the prayers of a desperate and wayward Londoner far from home, we were only a few minutes away from a Waitrose. We drove on, now with purpose.

Allow me to pause here and say that part of the comedy of this move is that I now live within the pages of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Daisy Barn is in a part of the country between Old Sodbury and North Nibley. I am not joking. Those are the actual names.

Thus, pulling up outside the Waitrose in Chipping Sodbury, pathetically relieved to be amongst such familiar produce, I felt at once entirely at home and like Honoria Glossop, which is something quite new.

Having bought a bumper pack of the good stuff, plus some paper plates to see us through until Emma B got her act together, we headed home. Home. To the little barn. Or as my aunt kindly described it: the hobbit house. My uncle, at 6ft 1, very nearly smashed his head on a beam on entering.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in a stand-off between the dogs and the sheep, with the ha-ha all that flimsily stood between hilarity and chaos. The sheep advanced, and so did the dogs. The sheep got bored of Bella shouting at them and pottered away, and Bella got bored of being ignored and pottered back to the house. Then the sheep – only wanting to feed from their bucket near the house - approached again and Bella shouted and so it went on all afternoon.

[ There is a ha-ha between the sheep field and the dogs, but you can’t see it in these photos ]

At what point, do you think, will the dogs acclimatise to having sheep nearby? I agree, it’s a novelty, but for how long, do you think? I hope it’s a kind of… 48-hour learning curve, but I fear it will be a much longer narrative arc.

The two folding chairs I had brought down had been refashioned earlier in the day into a barrier to barricade the chubby dachshund-sized hole in the fence, and so I ate dinner sitting on a folded up duvet cover watching a stuttering episode of Seinfeld as my phone went in and out of signal even while it remained in one place.

Happily, just as I took the pan of my favourite chickpeas off the simmer, an angry man drove full speed down the lane and practically threw an Emma Bridgewater box at me. And thus, I was, at least, eating the chickpeas off a plate.