During the down time however I kept myself fully occupied - I took a full time job for 4 months back at an agency I had worked at years ago & got back into the world of commuting (which was VILE - it nearly killed me 1 1/2 hours each way - that's the reason I didn't stay on which was sad as I loved the job) and enjoyed (!!) a full on truly nasty menopause (7 months of full body sweats, no more than 2 hours sleep a night and frequent changes of clothing, brain meltdown - hideous) which I am now (fingers crossed) through. I now understand why middle aged men suddenly up & leave their wives of 20 odd years - menopause turns rational, sane and reasonable women into emotional, exhausted, physically wrecked, blithering idiots!!
Oh and FSHubby and I finally bought our forever / run away to home!
We spent the latter part of last year really focussing on our 'get the hell out of dodge' plan; we spent weekends trawling the country - well after deciding that Cumbria and Lancashire were now seriously out of our price range (and we had quite a significant sum to spend!) trawling Wales; we realised that estate agents stretch the language to its limit - we saw amazing piles with astonishing views that needed £100,000's spending on them to become even liveable, we saw tiny places where we both had to duck to get through the front door, a crumbling, wonky floored15th Century Hall in Llanfyllin (pictured left) where Charles 1st reputedly spent a night, and an uber modern house precariously perched on the side of a hill that demanded a 4x4 to get to and because of its position enjoyed the full volume of the very busy A4655!
And in the spirit of widening our horizons we found ourselves celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary in a little boutique hotel called Pen-y-Dyffryn (http://www.peny.co.uk/), a lovely little place just outside Oswestry which is officially in England - Shropshire to be precise - but is very near the Welsh border. We had a clutch of houses to see in & around the area but one bothered us slightly. A converted mill sitting in an acre that seemed too good to be true. And when I rang the agent to discuss it, it transpired it was - I discovered the grounds were prone to flooding by the river that ran through the garden. So I immediately cancelled the viewing. But the agent was very persuasive and pointed out that as we were already in the area and that we had to virtually drive past it to get to another house we wanted to see, what did we have to lose? What indeed?!
