I find myself opposed to the idea of moving into a detached house for retirement, even if its replete with every creature comfort and planted in a pleasant corner of England. My reasons tumble out in a blur, as if unfolding in a dream shifting between memory and imagination:
1. The strangeness of country plumbing haunts me. The village sewers are a half-hearted whisper beneath the fields, not quite reaching the grassy lanes by our imagined cottage. Most folk end up with their own septic tanks, those bottomless pits that demand constant toilpumping, scrubbing, tending to their mysterious needs. Not every retiree, floating on a modest pension, has the means or the pluck for such grimy adventures.
2. To find water in your taps, you must conjure your own source. Some mornings, Id dig for a well, other days, Id wander out to tap a spring. No matter how the water spirits arrive, keeping them happy is a ceaseless businesspipes shiver with frost in winter, pumps sulk and burn under the summer sun, wells grow choked with silt. How am I, silver and weary, to tackle these chores alone or pay some handyman from distant Chelmsford?
3. Heating the house is a recurring puzzle. If theres a wood burner, it must be fed with endless logs and coal; if it runs on gas or the humming of the National Grid, it asks for a kings ransom to connect and install. My pension drifts away like a lost feather just contemplating such expense, and a broken boiler in January would drain every last pound.
4. Id have to face the garden path alone when snow wraps the lane in a thick, cold quilt. There are no council teams with whirring gritters or sturdy sweepers in the deep countryside. Its only you, a lopsided shovel, and the hours before dawn, hacking your way to the gate. The snow piles on again by night, threatening to lock you in until the world thaws.
5. Once the snow evaporates into a spring fog, summers relentless grass arrives. The lawn transforms into a wild sea that must be tamed every week with a mowers steady hand.
6. A whole garden claims your days and aches for your attention. If I close my eyes, I see myself turning the soil with spade or tiller, then hedged in by endless rows of beds and borderswatering, weeding, planting, reaping and stashing the harvest under the slow turning sky.
Only the flower bed at the porch, tended with my husband, or an occasional visit from our son seems manageable. But the great patchwork of earth at our feet demands a titans strength.
7. Villages are capricious, never promising you a surgery, a chemist, or even a post office. Often, the nearest shop huddles several miles away, and without a car youre left drifting along quiet lanes with only the sheep as company. Yearning for a doctors touch or a trim at the barbers means a trip into the citya days adventure, inconvenient and long.
Living in the countryside is no gentle dream and certainly not a thrifty one. Each year the house beckons to be mended in small, persistent ways; seeds and mulch call out from garden shops, the yard too must be tamed. With every season, the list grows, and I float through the tasks like a ghost, longing just to grow old quietly in a modest flat, up above the citys hum, letting the world spin by outside my window.
