A Decade At Damson Cottage

Exactly ten years ago today, Lord Malarkey and I were escaping from Kent to make a new life in Shropshire. Lord M was travelling ahead of me, following the removal van with Daisy and Camilla, our then resident hens. It was a hot day, and he made a supermarket stop to buy grapes for the girls, because a hen is partial to a grape, and he took them into the supermarket with him and nobody said a word! They were in a cat carrier, I hasten to add. He didn’t take them in ‘free range’ as it were.

I followed on a couple of hours or so later with Flora Bijou Mybug, having waited to hand the keys over the new owners of our old house. I had the added frisson of dealing with our solicitors who had managed to lock themselves out of their bank account so although the monies for the sale of our old house had arrived, they were unable to send the purchase payment onwards to the then-owners of Damson Cottage, so I was driving up not knowing if we’d have a completed house sale. Fortunately, Lord M arrived to collect the keys from the estate agent and the sale had just gone through, so he called to let me know and the rest of my journey felt less fraught. When I think about the whole Moving Day debacle though, it still makes me feel nauseous, so I don’t think about it. We did it, and that’s all that matters. 

Ten years seems a long time and yet it has also whizzed by. I started to make a list of everything we’ve done since living here, but it soon became a List of Enormous Proportions Covering a Broad Variety of Things so I gave up. Am I glad we made the move? Yes, I am! Absolutely, no regrets.

 I shall leave you with various photos of the garden, taken today, our 10th Moving Day Anniversary. We started out with a blank canvas, and looking at it now and how it has developed and grown, gives me enormous joy and satisfaction…