So we moved...

I haven't blogged for nearly a decade, and the landscape's changed so much in that time. My children are teenagers, I've been back to university to do my MSc, and blogging is now something people do as a career. Not to mention the world being in economic and political meltdown. It was actually the morning after the 2015 election that we decided to move house. We had a day off work for our wedding anniversary and were morosely working through the papers after breakfast when I spotted what I didn't know I'd been looking for. We rang up and went to see it that same afternoon, put an offer in there and then and had sold The Worst House by lunchtime the next day. I honestly thought that I'd only be carried out of The Worst House in a box, but it turns out that what you really want when you're 47 is a detached Edwardian villa with off-street parking in a cosy outer SW London suburb where Cote, Marks and Spencer and Jigsaw are your local shops and the Zone 6 (aggh) station whisks you into Waterloo in, ooh, about 36 minutes on a good day. And the worst thing was, it was 'done up', complete with you know, heating and stuff. I feel ashamed just writing that. We had nine very happy years in The Worst House, and it's where my children spent most of their childhood. We replaced pretty much every wall, floor and fixture in that place and much as it pains me to walk past now and see what the new owners have done to it, I'm glad we made the move. We've done some things to the new place over the last three years that make me happy so I'll post a few of them here.