Why I’ve moved to a hipster flat at 75
It’s downsizing, but not as you know it! Here ELISABETH LUARD explains...
JUST three weeks ago I moved from my five- bedroom, pink, slate-roofed Georgian farmhouse with outbuildings and 100-acre woodland in Wales to a small, but perfectly formed, studio in West London.
And at my age (I was 75 last Christmas). What on Earth was I thinking? It’s a time when sensible downsizers are relocating to a one-bed on the Eastbourne seafront, followed by a retirement community in leafy Sussex.
not for me. not yet. I’m writing this next to my suspended glass staircase (no chance it would pass the chairlift test) with a view of my kitchen with its built-in microwave, self-cleaning oven and breakfast bar with embedded finger-tip hob that only works with purpose-made pans. not to mention my American- style fridge ( handy for chilling Champagne).
Mine is the smallest flat in the building and I’m on the ground floor, with intercom and push-button admission — as handy for book deliveries and visiting grandchildren as it must be for my bachelor co-residents rolling in late from the pub.
Counterintuitive as it may sound, I am not alone in my decision to return from country to city. It is becoming more and more popular for us over-70s to leave what can be a lonely life, however romantic, to be near our families and friends. Developers are beginning to take note of a nationwide trend. City life suits the old as well as the young.
Our requirements are much the same as those of first-time buyers — we are happy in small spaces that are easy to maintain, and most of us like the neighbourliness of apartment blocks, especially when we are not confined to our own age group.
I’m already on nodding terms with the under-40s in my building — but so far I think I’m the only oldie.
And another thing. We old folk are at our best where there is reliable public transport, well- funded hospitals with roundthe-clock casualty (yes, I know), walking-distance groceries and green spaces that don’t need mo wing, digging or pruning.
But for me at least, the most important consideration is proximity to children and grandchildren. My daughters Poppy and Honey both have flourishing careers and five children between them: Jessie, 18, Bonnie, 17, Harper, 14, Iona, almost 13, and Orin, ten. My son Caspar lives in new York and I haven’t seen as much of my American granddaughters — Sophie, 16, and Plum, 14, — as I’d have liked, but now I live just along the road from Heathrow, I hope this will change.
It was my children who informed me it was time to live in a place where a hospital visit didn’t mean a long journey in both directions. And what, for that matter, would happen if I couldn’t pay the bills inevitable with a large old house that needs constant maintenance?
‘It has to happen, Ma. Before it’s too late.’ Too late for what? I was outraged. I have a working career and good friends. I look after myself, eat well and regularly — I’m a cookery writer, for heaven’s sake! I work out several times a week and can hold the plank for, well, maybe not as long as Gwynnie, but close.
But the writing was already on the wall. I had made light of a tumble I’d taken on wet moss on concrete steps, when I ripped my elbow to the bone and had to drive 15 miles to casualty for antibiotics and stitches.
It took a while — two years and 63 viewings — but finally my Welsh romantic idyll found a buyer and, suddenly, the deal was done.
no time to lose — London’s property market is brutal — I put down the deposit on my new abode sight unseen, on the say-so of Poppy. ‘There’s a sleeping platform with your very own shower-room. It’ll be just like being a student. But posh.’
Given the choice, I’ve always preferred a long soak in a bath with a book — and I was never a student, posh or otherwise. But Poppy (and sometimes I) had already trailed round enough just-about-affordable one-bedroom conversions to know what worked and what didn’t.
And if I was going to change my life, then best do it properly in a minimal- maintenance, purposebuilt apartment designed for time-starved high-flyers.
I’m no stranger to my new city. I was born in London during the Blitz — not that I remember the bombs. But, well, it has been 30 years since I was even an occasional visitor. And I haven’t yet quite got the measure of the metropolis.
I’m easing myself into my new life gradually. It’s not the big things I miss — good friends are not easily lost when there are so many ways to keep in touch.
What’s missing in the city is a sense of belonging — the reassurance of exchanges on the road about the weather (rain or shine, for farmers it’s never right), or the price of lamb at auction in Devil’s Bridge. I’ll miss Aberystwyth, my home town for 25 years, which is longer than I’ve lived anywhere.
I already miss the fortnightly farmers’ market, the butcher who is also a shepherd, my friends at the university sports centre where we all worked out together. And the handsome Art Deco reading room at the national Library of Wales, my refuge in winter for central heating and fast broadband.
BUT
most of all I’ll miss Ollie, my handsome marmalade moggie and constant companion these past five years — no matter that he’s safe in a feline-friendly household where they’ll rub his furry tummy with a booted foot, as I did, and he, in return, is free to hunt the hedgerows and hide live shrews behind the sink. He’s a country cat, but I miss his presence in my life, though he probably won’t miss mine.
And I miss my sense of place. It’s
as if humans, like sheep, are bonded to the land. I miss the tap-tap of the woodpecker on the pine tree by the lily pond beside the blue-painted studio where my husband nicholas used to write. The drink got him in the end, so I’ve been on my own these past ten years.
It has been 20 years, too, since our beloved daughter Francesca came home for peace and strength when the HIV that took her from us at not yet 30 was too hard to bear.
We can’t choose what we remember and what to forget. Memories linger in rural Wales. I hadn’t realised what a burden they were until the weight was lifted. Hadn’t expected my heart to lighten as I drove for the last time along my shamefully pot- holed track, across the bridge over the stream.
At first my shiny new living-machine didn’t really feel like home, though I slept soundly on the architect-designed sleeping platform with en- suite shower. And I’m working on my social life — a writer is naturally solitary — and take care to accept every invitation that comes my way.
Best of all is that my grandchil- dren are delighted to find their granny so close by. Where once they had been happy to spend long summer holidays in my company doing what children do, they are now teenagers with social lives in the city. They will keep their memories of bottle-feeding lambs and wild-swimming in rivers, but my old home had served its purpose.
And now, with granny on hand, they can drop by all the time. While the eldest, Jessie, is already elsewhere at university, her sister Bonnie has plans to dye my hair purple instead of the usual tasteful auburn.
Her cousin Iona has revamped granny’s make-up routine with brushes and diagrams — and I admit she has a point. not to overlook that all of them are more than capable of keeping me up to speed on the World Wide Web, and know by instinct which buttons to tap or twist in my state-of-the-art kitchen.
I have kept my kitchen table — some things are non-negotiable. Made for me by a ship’s carpenter when we lived in Andalusia in Spain, it has found itself at home beneath the see-through glasswalled staircase, awaiting a new generation of kitchen suppers. And just outside my window — there is only one, but it’s big — I am planning a cactus-garden that will thrive in the city heat.
What have I kept? not much. Family portraits, a handful of framed photos and four of my own botanical paintings, reminders of a different life when our children were young and went to school on a donkey, and we all lived in a house in a cork- oak forest in Spanish sunshine. other times, other places. ‘At first it didn’t really look like granny’s,’ observed orin, the youngest grandson, inspecting bare walls and boxes with the perceptive eye of a ten-year-old. ‘And then I saw all sorts of familiar things, and now it does.’
He’s right. There are pictures and books and my desk.
I’m not yet ready for the bucket list. I have things to do, places to go, people to see, books to write. And my new apartment (flat doesn’t sound quite right for such a new York-ish space) is just about perfect for the next creative chapter in my life.
Right now I’m working on a brand new memoir-with-recipes. It’s called Coming Home, as you might have guessed.
ELISABETH’S latest memoir, Squirrel Pie (And Other Stories), is out in paperback from Bloomsbury in mid- July.