Moving Out/Moving In

Hard to find a way to write about being here and what this move from city suburb to rural village is all about, why we’ve done it and how we can make it work. On the day we moved, the sun sneakily came out and shone pointedly down onto Devonshire Road, Chorlton, Manchester, making everything - even the graffiti - glow as if blessed by the saint of cities. (Saint Urban maybe?)

    



I drove, which was just as well, as R was homesick already for the Metrolink, the A5013 to the airport, the M60 to the Stockport B and Q, and strangely even for the Tile Solutions emporium; the car dealerships; the boarded up pubs and fifth-hand furniture shops and for all the rest of the clutter and muddle along the A6. Even the eternal roadworks and ram-jammed traffic in Hazel Grove took on a sweet nostalgic gleam. In Buxton, the weather turned spiteful: sideways rain and a gale blowing up.

The move went as house moves go - too much stuff, boxes piled to the ceiling, the important things you really need at the bottom of the pile; tiredness, fear, excitement, getting the kettle on and finding the biscuits. There were added complications:  the removal van not being able to get out of the lane to our house until one of our neighbours drove to Ashbourne, six miles away to get a set of car keys. Don’t ask. Also we’ve downsized but nobody seems to have told our stuff yet. Our sofa bed wouldn’t fit through the door to the sitting room. ‘No-way, never,’ said Gary the removal man, ‘it’s them thick stone walls, not in a million.’ So now it’s in the conservatory waiting for somebody to decide what to do with it. 





The neighbours were lovely. Kind and helpful: the one who went for the car-keys, our next door neighbours on both sides bringing us cake, a card, a photograph of our house as it was, invitations and introductions. Although we didn’t feel at home, they made us feel as though one day we might.

 

When the removal van had inched its way back to the main road and the kind neighbours had left us alone in the fading daylight we stood in the garden and looked out over the village at the view of the hill. The weather was Mancunian:  thick-bellied clouds rolling in from the west, rain sluicing down, visibility low.
You don’t get away that easily, said the city inside me.  

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