Beware the Lodge, (especially the West ones)

When we moved here from Birmingham just over a year ago, I was completely smitten with our new little home; West Lodge. The rent was fabulously cheap, the walls were fabulously freshly painted and the house was fabulously empty and ready to go. See where I’ve written ‘fabulously’ there? If I’d known what I know now you would have read them as ‘suspiciously’... more fool me, eh?

Anyway, West Lodge is a cute three bedroom dormer cottage, with a large kitchen, a lounge diner, downstairs bathroom, utility and large porch. It also has a massive rambling garden where I visualised our (at the time) unborn child running around filling his lungs with the fresh countryside air. “Fab”, I thought. “Living the dream” I said. Right, well, here we are just over a year later and I have experienced  such joys as mushrooms growing in the hall, frogs living in the bathroom toilet and mould growing on the inside of windows. The gas for the central heating costs an arm and a leg and resides for surprisingly short amount of time in a tank in the garden before making a very brief appearance in the house as an asthmatic cough of heat before it disappears through the entirely un-insulated leaking roof. It’s cold, it’s dark and it’s miserable, the TV doesn’t work because of a tree in the garden which we can’t chop down and it’s ever such a long way to the toilet from your bed in the middle of the night when you’re 8 months pregnant.

There’s no shop within walking distance... that 24 hour Spar at the end of the road in Birmingham is a distant memory. Tractors go over the horrendously squeaky cattlegrid on the farm track opposite at all hours of the day and night, whereas before I’d only occasionally be woken by a speeding joyrider. The power goes off all the time; and the electricity company says “it’s cows rubbing up against the poles and tripping the switches” whereas it used to be metal thieves risking life and limb for some cabling in Birmingham. When I walk out of the back door at night nip to the car, it’s so dark I’m scared I’ll get lost on the way, whereas in Birmingham I never even saw the dark. But maybe, at the end of this ramble where I set out to warn you of the pitfalls of living in a rural ‘Lodge’, it turns out that living in our damp little Lodge isn’t all that different from living in a Birmingham Semi. Only the thing is... it is, in fact... it’s perfect here and I wouldn’t go back to good old suburbia for all the mains gas in the North Sea. And who could blame me... right?