Shakespeare Country

This is the south view from our house, which looks out over some of the land attached to the farm. This part of the River Avon valley (you can’t actually see the river, but it’s in there somewhere, I promise. Running left to right.) is South Warwickshire, with views to Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and the Cotswold escarpment in the distance. I feel that the barn on the left hand side has actually burnt down since this photo was taken, and rebuilt. I could be wrong, it might be the new one: barns always look pretty much of a muchness to me. I could go and ask John, but he has just refused me a bite of his breakfast bacon sandwich, so I am sulking in the office alone, hungry.

There are umpteen snippets of folklore pertaining to Stratford Upon Avon’s most famous son floating about locally, as you’d expect. He got drunk at a pub in our nearest village and walked home in the rain to catch his death of pneumonia, apparently. Stratford town is also supposed to have entered a drinking competition with the local villages in which he enthusiastically participated, afterwards coining the doggerel ‘Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton, Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford, Beggarly Broom, Drunken Bidford’. Hillborough, now a tiny hamlet, is visible (just!) in the photo; all the other villages are a pleasant stroll from here.

Since we built our current house (brick built, centrally heated, most mod cons), our hilltop view is the envy of all our friends. We have told them about the low water pressure, the road noise and exposure to the howling wind and rain, and it falls on deaf ears: they all want to move in. However, when we lived in this house’s predecessor on the same site, no-one was quite as keen to swop. The bungalow was a pre-fab wooden chalet sporting a wooden shingle roof, all of which was considerably past its sell-by date. The main heating consisted of a motley collection of night storage heaters, the inadequacy of which was so pronounced that butter left in the fridge was considerably more pliable than butter left out on the table. The curtains, heavy-weight and good-quality notwithstanding, used to continually waft several inches in the breeze around the windows.

Before I moved in with John, he used to watch TV in the winter evenings wearing a ski-ing hat, mainly because he was too mean to switch on the electric bar heater in the lounge. After we started going out he discovered that my rented cottage, despite having turned at least its 350th birthday, was significantly warmer, and proceeded to spend much of the winter of 02/03 there, to the vague irritation of my house-mate. I had initially been delighted with John’s hilltop nook, but as the season turned colder I, too, was keen to abandon it.

Come the spring, the idiocy of paying two lots of bills became too much to endure and I moved to the bungalow. Now, its dilapidations became more apparent. I pushed open the kitchen window one morning, whereupon the bottom section of frame finally succumbed to rot and detached completely from the window, whilst I clung bemusedly to the handle. The pane of glass, no longer supported at the bottom, for some mysterious reason did not obey the laws of gravity and guillotine onto the grass, but hung there until I had the sense to clap the window shut and wedge the bottom back in, quick.

Following a spring gale, I noticed that the grass (could not be justifiably called ‘turf’, let alone ‘garden’) was covered in broken wooden shards. Further investigation resulted in my discovery that this was, in fact, the roof. And so it went on. Eventually we (rather a royal ‘we’, that – I was a most unwilling indian among the chiefs) built another house a few feet in front of the now-moribund bungalow.

The proximity of the new house to the existing house caused a few problems, and in hindsight we should have demolished the bungalow first and built the house on the same site. We could have lived in a static caravan (trans: trailer.) quite happily; we are just that sort of trash! The fact that the houses were only 6ft apart at one corner made demolition of the bungalow particularly exciting, as collapse in the wrong direction could have been embarrassing.

I mortally injured our camera early in the proceedings, when John invited me to join him in thumping holes in the walls. Our monstrous office desk had originally been obliged to enter the bungalow minus its legs, so John had decided simply to chainsaw an exit hole for it in the wall. It’s not every day you get to kick a house to death, so I joined in with vigour. Too much vigour: despite John’s just-audible warning, my foot shot straight through and I fell wildly into the wall, walloping the camera lens. Doh. John’s mother (an indefatigable saver of complete junk) had finally managed to gain ingress to our abandoned home that morning, and was frantically squirrelling items we had gleefully abandoned. She sounded surprised when the chainsaw, followed by the feet, came through the wall, but she carried on regardless.

Demolition day went off smoother than expected, particularly the bit where the bungalow, lashed around with cable, sailed away up the hill; although we did get awfully over-excited about the business: none of us stopped to consider the fact that, actually, removing the glass from the windows first might have been clever. We now do not have a patch of glass-free soil to our name and it will all need top-soiling and turfing before Harry can have a play area. 

I have just noticed re-watching this video that the kitchen window on the left of screen is waving wildly; once again liberated – forever, in fact - from its bottom section of frame. All in all, we had lots of fun, and later got toastie-warm when we set light to the heap. So warm, in fact, that we had to move the cars 50ft further away before the paint blistered.

The house has been built 4 years now, and still we have pallets of spare bricks floating oxymoronically around the hen run. The last bedroom to be tackled - admittedly, always destined to be the nursery, and hence a no-go zone - was finally updated from bare plaster walls and floorboards during my 6th month of pregnancy. Throughout the house there are still odd unvarnished skirting boards, doors lacking architraves, cupboards without doors, and balcony doors to be re-fitted. To be fair to ourselves, it’s a big house, and the upper east end of the house is completely uninhabited. The occasional creaking board has left us wondering if the itinerant fruit pickers have quietly moved in to squat: if they kept the noise down they might almost get away with it. In short, John and I seem to have many ways to be lazy, and only houseguests or an impending baby have succeeded in propelling us out of our decorating stupor.

I have told John in no uncertain terms that I want a summer house and a patch of nice turf in time for Harry’s first birthday on the 3rd August. As I was denied the balloons and bubbly that usually accompany a birth – we were far too busy worrying ourselves sick- I have been happily over-compensating ever since. Harry’s christening was a large affair, albeit one at which we took virtually no photos,

    

with lots of lovely balloons, flowers and a 12″ cake over which I took A) pains and B) particularly crap photos of.

   

 

I also insisted on having champagne, which horrified the Hubby rather. He was correspondingly parsimonious with the dosages, so we still have some left for Harry’s birthday, which I am contentedly planning already.

We are very blessed in our lives: we have an inexpressibly wonderful little boy, a comfortable home in a beautiful situation, loving family, great friends, and a happy marriage. We will probably encounter problems in trying to enlarge our family, but if we can’t manage it then I know we have so much already to be thankful for. 

Now, if I could only make all my bloggy friends pregnant that want to be, lose 3 stone and keep the fox away from my hens…