Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
I feel incredibly lucky to live where I live
As she helps families who’ve moved to the country in a new show, Kate Humble tells why, in the current crisis, she values her rural isolation even more
Kate Humble has three unbreakable rules when she appears on TV: she doesn’t use make-up, she wears her own clothes and she has to be outdoors. She’s practising what she preaches today – her blonde curls are tied back with an elastic band and she’s wearing woolly socks and slippers, muddy jeans and a black fleece after taking her beloved dogs Badger, Bella and Teg for their daily walk.
‘It’s pretty much the same outfit I wore all the way through filming my new show,’ she laughs. ‘But I’ve been able to do this job for 20 years because I’ve always been honest with the audience. I’ve just said, “This is me.” If you put me in sequins it’s not going to work – I’m going to be really uncomfortable and dreadful to watch.’
The new six-part Channel 5 series, called Twice The Life For Half The Price, sees Kate join six families desperate to leave the rat race behind and radically overhaul their quality of life. Kate has been there herself, when she and her TV producer husband Ludo Graham moved to a fouracre smallholding in the Wye Valley from London in 2007.
She knew instantly she had found her home for life, describing it as her own ‘muddy, green little patch of heaven’. So not only was she a cheerleader for the families taking brave steps into the unknown, but she also offered a practical pair of hands as they navigated the first few months.
It all proved a huge emotional throwback for Kate. ‘Oh my God, I spent quite a lot of time in tears because I’ve done it myself. When people said, “It’s so brave to up sticks and move to rural Wales,” it didn’t feel brave because I was so desperate,’ she says. ‘It was brave of my husband knowing he was going to be stuck in Wales with this madwoman. But for me it was completely fabulous.
‘It may not work for everybody, but for those it does work for it’s a liberation. What’s extraordinary is that in every single family I met for the show I saw a physical change – it’s like somebody had lifted a tenton weight off everyone’s shoulders.’
Some of the families wanted to live a fully sustainable life by growing vegetables and keeping pigs and chickens, some wanted to pay off their mortgage and live simply, while others were opting to work flexibly from home, meaning more quality time with their family. But they were all keen to leave behind conspicuous consumption. ‘It’s a big life change as you’re uprooting from friends, communities and possibly jobs. All the families had dreamt about it for a long time so it wasn’t just a whim,’ says Kate. ‘These are regular folk – not super-rich. They’re people who thought, “We’re going for it.” And everyone is now radiating joy.’ Among the participants are Phil and Vicki Goldby, who lived in a four-bedroom house with one bathroom in Epsom, Surrey, with their nine children aged between 16 and two months. Not only were the older children home-schooled, but they were also using a downstairs room as a fifth bedroom. Vicki grew up in rural Staffordshire and always dreamed of moving back to the countryside, while Phil – who is managing director of a digital media company – worked from home. The couple were keen for their children to have a rounded life education and wanted to become more self-sufficient.
So their Epsom property was sold for £730,000 and they bought a threeacre former dairy farm in Shropshire
with a five-bedroomed house for £600,000. With renovation, it could become seven bedrooms, with a large barn and paddocks. But Phil and Vicki needed help as they didn’t know where to start. ‘One of the things they told me is they get through 40 shop-bought eggs a week, so I said hens would be a good start with your self-sufficiency,’ says Kate.
‘I introduced them to Jane Howorth, who founded the British Hen Welfare Trust and rehomes ex-commercial laying hens. When the birds are just under a year old they’re still productive, but not enough to make money, and the margins are so small, you can’t keep a bird that isn’t 100 per cent productive. So now the family have 12 British Hen Welfare Trust hens. They arrived looking unbelievably scruffy because lots of them had never been outdoors before. Then they started laying like fury.
‘The family like to eat sausages too, so when one of my pigs, Gertie, had a litter they took three piglets. The family have been emailing me and they’ve just got their own cow.’
The most moving part of the show was when Kate met freelance gardener Alain Cook and his wife Jen, who lived in Exeter with their girls Freya, 13, and Olivia, eight. They moved 700 miles to the Shetland Islands, selling their home for £220,000 and buying a house in Yell for £125,000, mortgage-free.
‘I loved that Alain and Jen just wanted adventure. But Jen was so close to her mother who was ill and died just after they moved. She had her mum’s blessing, but it doesn’t make it easier,’ says Kate, who cried with Jen during filming as her loss struck a personal nerve.
‘My father died in February last year,’ says Kate. ‘It’s really weird because sometimes you can be completely fine, and then it just comes up and bites you in the bottom. I keep saying, “Thank God he’s not alive with this awful Covid-19 disease.”’
Indeed, the show will make for heartening viewing in these troubled times. With our cities reeling more than anywhere else under the scourge of the coronavirus, opting for a new life in the country seems a very smart choice. Who wouldn’t want to live the good life, raising their own chickens and livestock and eating fresh produce picked from the land?
‘I’m basically self-isolated most of the time, a miserable old witch stomping around in my wellies,’ says Kate. ‘But we’ve got such a lovely community around here. We’ve got a couple of older neighbours so we’re all in touch with each other, making sure everyone’s OK. I feel so incredibly lucky to live where I live.
‘I’ve just finished a new book called A Year Of Living Simply and it’s basically about what we’re having to do now with Covid-19, about connecting with things that make us happy. Growing and fixing things, being out in nature and together.’
Kate, of course, is completely familiar with country life. The last time we met she’d been up since the crack of dawn combing through her curls to get rid of hundreds of red mites – small but deadly critters that had infested her chicken coops. But nothing dents her passion for nature, and her enthusiasm has made her a treasured wildlife presenter on shows from Springwatch to Lambing Live.
Indeed many viewers were devastated when she left Springwatch after six years in 2011. ‘I needed to leave to be scared again,’ she says. In the event, the biggest leap into the unknown for Kate was waving goodbye to London. A few years later, she and Ludo also took on a larger farm nearby, and in partnership with its tenant farmers and other locals, they run a rural skills school, Humble By Nature, teaching hedge-laying, sheep shearing, lambing and food production. It’s a lifestyle adventure many of us would love.
‘It’s a big life change, but everyone’s now radiating joy’
Lisa Sewards Twice The Life For Half The Price begins next month on Channel 5.