by Until I was 42 years old, I lived happily in the city. I loved shops, restaurants, taxis and comfort. I hated insects, mud, cows and Pitch-Dark-Gassen. Then two things happened: I experienced the real landscape in all its wild beauty when I visited the West Highlands – and I fell in love with a man who lived there. I finally moved there two years later. We are now married and I have learned a lot about the DOS and nothing of rural life for a decade. If you also remember to move, I discovered the following …
Finding friends requires effort
Do not assume that you can flow into existing book groups or Pilates classes painlessly and find immediate friends. The book group has been going with the same members since 1986, and Pilates takes place every Tuesday at 6 a.m. I came to local Facebook groups, met a nearby member for coffee and gradually found other friends. It helps if you have cold water swimming and dogs.
Do you always have a power reduction kit
Power failures are a function, not a mistake, and you have to keep your kit accessible in one place. It should contain candles, lighters, a strong torch, batteries and packaged foods for which no heating is required. This is the unique time in which you can justify the food of UPFS – in the pitch blackness that stumbles over the cat.
Make on the way an hour earlier
If you are already struggling with the time measurement, you do not move to the landscape. Wherever they go, they remain behind a tractor. Farm vehicles can run over for you, but those who are not the pootling tourists who are forced to drive at 15 km / h so that they can appreciate each bog standard along the route and refuse to have them overtaken. It is easiest if you only accept this.
Watch your Wi-Fi
Just because it works on Tuesday, there is no guarantee that your Wi-Fi will work on Wednesday. It has to bounce off the chicken stable next door, on the trail of a gutter clogged with leaf on the trail and a certain oak to reach it. So there is a good chance that this is not the case. If you work from home how many country residents, you will get Starlink at great expense. We may hate Elon Muschus – but it works.
Accept your ‘beautiful clothes days are over
The landscape has a strict uniform and they would be stupid to defend the rules. Interiors: old jeans, warm sweater, slippers with fleece sucks. Outdoors: Merino-Wool-Base layers, waterproof coat, waterproof pants, waterproof hat, wool socks thicker than boiler delay, dubarry boot or Aigle/Le Chameau-Wellies (hunters are for music festivals). For dinner: cleaning jeans, warm jumper, flat boots for returning to the car in the dark.
Learn to repair your roof
Gales met harder than in the city. Much more difficult: think that Twister run over the prairie. There is a high chance that you will lose roof tiles, gutters and chimney pots – and everyone else will also lose their losing so that they cannot get a roofer for weeks. Buy a robust ladder and learn how to replace a few tiles.
Understand how to build a fire …
… and keep it running. If the boiler collapses in the middle of winter and you cannot get a repair man out, a real fire is the only thing that is between you and hypothermia. Buy Feuerighter. Take a look at YouTube videos. Keep your chimneys swept unless you want a living owl dinghy into the stove when the smoke is curling up. (That happened to us. The owl was okay.)
Forget the statistics of the city crimes
New arrivals still block their doors and cars. Old hands laugh at their trembling paranoia. Most of us have not seen our door keys since 2017 because we have nothing to be stolen.
Hug streaming services
You can still go to the multiplex, night clubs and gigs, but one of them has to drive and you will come home at 4 a.m. It is much easier to accept that your new friends are called Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+.
Love your local shop
If you are lucky enough to be one. It is. Everything will be three times as high as the price for wait rose and with “everything” I mean two withered red peppers and a faded calendar with local views. However, your little local is a lifeline when you go out the milk and also deliver it with all the local gossip. The waiver of hummus is a small price.
Drive a 4×4
Country SUVs are not shiny Chelsea tractors, they are well-groomed, motorized, motorized dandruff with dogs, boots and anoraks. You will also bring them through winter without going to a ditch. If you cannot extend to a Range Rover, a Dacia duster will do the third hand.
Your plots will be too late
Postal services in remote areas are like the Cheshire Cat. They come and go. “Next-Day Delivery” is a flexible concept, and the persecution of your orders is like a very boring episode of Race around the world.
Be careful with the visitors
As soon as people listen to the activation expression “move into the country”, they will put on plans for long holidays at the expense. It is at home for you. For them it is a free Airbnb with great view and cooking from the barrel. Never reveal that you have a guest room.
Enter the pub quiz – but do not win
Each village has a pub, every pub has a quiz, and each quiz has a team of locals in retirement called Muddy Marauders or Big Farmer who always win. If you and your colleagues start a challenge, this will not forget. If you put on the fourth for the first decade or something, you could add third place.
Young people will take risks
The most insane teenagers I’ve ever met lived in the deepest cumbria. Your idea of fun was to vibrate on a frayed rope over a roaring stream. If you remove teenagers from the sanitary city fun, you will be warned that you will make your own fatally dangerous land fun. In addition, you have to roll it absolutely everywhere, which is why all rural descendants learn to ride 12 with a quad bike and to pass your driving tests on your 17th birthdays without errors.
Identify the local villain
To really mix, you need to know who the main sign is. Could be a city council that blocks planning applications that could be newcomers to the Big House, the family whose ancestors rustled sheep. Note: If you don’t find it out within six months, you are.
The village hall is everything
If you are lucky enough to have a village hall, appreciate it. Our moderators yoga, exhibitions, film evenings, letters, opera, jumble sales, handicraft sessions and board games. Your maybe in 1972 had the ambience of a scout hut, but you will love it. Note that you will be on the committee in the committee in the committee in the committee next October.
Check your dog
Never let your dog roam near the sheep. In cross -border terms, this corresponds to a triple murder in NYC. Also know that every dog has (plural). Around 90 percent of the polite small talk is about animals. So if you don’t have any, the easiest way is to pretend you. Spaniels or Labradors ideally. Collies are dogs at Ninja level for farmers who know what they are doing.
Make your peace with mud
There are no more clean floors – not in the kitchen, in the car or in a bedroom. Silge reaches into every corner and in every corner, into her jeans, into her coat and into her hair. If you have dogs or small children, they quadruple that. For this reason everyone needs a trunk (and a cleaner).
Potatoes need age to grow
Self -sufficiency in a sitcom of the 1970s is fun. Less if you have output thousands for your state -of -the -art vegetable garden and will not sprout anything out of snails. The growth of food is a painfully long-term project-you do not offer you a stylish smell of vegetables in the Abel & Cole style within three months. Just buy your vegetables from the cooperative like everyone else.
Everyone leaves dinner parties early
Do you remember these loud urban gatherings that rolled in the last midnight? Land evenings start at 7 p.m. and are over until 10:30 p.m. because it takes 40 minutes to go home, there are no taxis and all are up to date with the dogs at 6 a.m.
Friends with your neighbors
It is irrelevant whether you like you. Neighbors mean support when the roof flaps, allies when the local farmer is angry (he will be) and someone who picks up packages when he finally appears.
Nature is brutal
Make this Bukolian chicken dream pause. When I discovered that our neighbors’ charming chickens had been slaughtered by Pine Martens overnight. Land life means the proximity to deer legs, pheasants drives, endless road kills and dizzying gore levels. So before you welcome a herd of rescue bantam to gently inform the children about eggs, consider how to explain the merciless massacre after the fox has given a visit.
There is no “health and security”
In the city there is a feeling that the danger is managed with traffic lights and that barriers are warned about potholes and signs everywhere. But they are alone in the country. This solo cow could be a bull; There are blind corners and no street lamps; You can get lost easily and your telephone signal does not always work – so you have to develop your own reductions. I learned that after I was lost in a bog here at least 12 times in my first year.
The landscape is wonderful
After 10 years there is no part of me who regretted being drawn to one of the most remote landscapes in Great Britain. I love it so much that I supported my latest novel on my own step from city to land and tried to grasp the feeling of falling in love with a place. It is uncomfortable, time-consuming, occasionally lonely, the weather can be terrible and the entertainment is very limited-but it is wild, beautiful, relaxed and fulfilling. It is exactly what I want. I hope it’s exactly the same for you.
Dreams of the Scottish highland (Book vocal) from Flic Everett is now available
