5th August 2026
Change is afoot – and not just in my profile picture. I’d been thinking about mixing it up anyway when my mind was made up by a friend suggesting that my previous one showed me looking a bit smug and put her off reading my posts! Well, we can’t have that – so a change it is. The new iteration shows me attempting to blow a conch shell onboard the Barbados catamaran Cool Runnings, a favourite day out of ours. As a childhood trombone player who can sometimes coax a more pleasing sound than a raspberry from a didgeridoo, I’ve been known to attempt a repeat of the trick with a conch. Success is usually in inverse proportion to the strength of the rum punch onboard!
More fundamental change came our way on 22nd July, when we left the house we’d lived in very happily for 19 years in the countryside between Bristol and Bath, and moved our UK operations to the medieval cathedral city of Salisbury. Much as we loved our former home Swallow Court – we used to say we’d be buried in the vegetable beds – we’d had slightly itchy feet even before stumbling on Pollards Mill. Nicola’s growing passion for painting was crowding us out a bit, and we considered adding a garden room or an extension to give her a creative space. We even made an unsuccessful offer on a farmhouse across the valley. Then fate intervened and we found ourselves with rather more space than we needed – there was just the small matter of it being on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As a result we knew we had to release some equity and make our UK base a more affordable and practical option than a rural property with a septic tank, oil-fired heating (Trump’s war on Iran has been painful, I can tell you) and other beautiful but awkward idiosyncrasies, so Swallow Court was put up for sale in March 2024. Completion took place last month. That tells you everything you need to know about the state of the market, even allowing for a period when we withdrew it due to lack of interest.
After 19 years there we’d accumulated a fair amount of stuff. Add in the purchase and sale of two holiday cottages and the passing of all four of our parents during that time and, even after shipping a container to Barbados, we had to do some serious culling. We have embraced the joys of Facebook Marketplace (with surprising success! – amazingly satisfying) and hauled a fair few loads to the local dump. This was the last:
Don’t worry – we have another feather duster!
More than one unkind so-called friend has suggested that my treasured (and still growing) collection of National Geographic magazines should meet the same fate. Over my dead body!
As you can see, the shelf was bursting at the seams, so a new house was required. Well, downsizing is hardly going to help with that, is it?! I know, I know – I’ll find a solution…
There’s a lot of emotional investment in a house you’ve lived in for a long time. Before my Dad died in 2009 he gave Nicola a treasured Fantin Latour rose he’d been growing in a pot, knowing he wouldn’t live to plant it in the ground himself. He also knew that his green-fingered daughter in law was a safe pair of hands, unlike his eldest son (horticultural skills strictly limited to riding a drive mower, laying waste with a weed whacker and chopping bamboo with a cutlass). His faith was amply rewarded – the rose has bloomed stunningly every year since, producing dozens of delicate and intricate pale pink flowers with an exquisite perfume. The 2020 edition put a smile on our faces during lockdown:
The ‘M’ on the slate in the flowerbed is for my father Mansel. ❤️
(For God’s sake lighten up, man! – Ed.) Right! Well, moving a small slate to a new home is no biggie, but a large mature woody rose bush? Hmmm. Green fingers to the rescue – here’s the cutting: 🤞🤞🤞
Our own episode of Garden Rescue didn’t stop there. Our lovely friend Viv gave Nicola another stunning bloom – a ‘Bart’s Nurse’ rose – a couple of years ago. This gem was specially bred to mark the 120th anniversary of the founding of the League of Nurses at London’s world-renowned St Bartholomew’s Hospital where they both trained (admittedly not in the first intake, but not too far behind 😆). A cutting wouldn’t suffice for this beauty – it was dug up and was coming with us, roots and all, fully potted up. 💪
And there were more – not least our cheeseplant Charlie, which is the only plant I’ve ever taken responsibility for after growing it in my office. In December 2020, when it was already four feet tall including pot, we swaddled it in black plastic bin bags, loaded it into the back seat of our convertible (those were the days 😆) and lugged it 20 miles home in the freezing winter air with the roof down, me hugging it tenderly and suffering only mild frostbite in the process. It thrived in the following years until the traditional slash and burn technique reduced it to a few stumps before the move. It’s sprouting already!
But, obviously, we couldn’t take everything – we waved a sad goodbye to Nicola’s grandmother’s 31 year old greenhouse, which Nicola’s highly skilled engineer father Peter and his willing but limited apprentice (me) moved in pieces from Somerset to South Gloucestershire and reassembled in our garden in 2010. After many summers graced with crunchy mini cucumbers and the sweetest vine tomatoes (Nicola used to say her greatest challenge was getting the harvest from the greenhouse to the kitchen without eating it all en route), we successfully removed all the panes of glass, but the corroded nuts and bolts on the aluminium frame finally defeated us after many hot and fruitless (boom boom) hours of grunting, swearing and WD-40. The frame ended up crushed and taken to the dump in the boot of our trusty Ford Fiesta. But thank you, Grans – it was great.
Believe it or not, this lengthy post is merely a sample of our preparation for the move. It’s now 19th July. The packers arrive tomorrow. We are ready 💪
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