Escape to the country?
Townies told to go home
It’s been the source of so many arguments; late into the night discussions. Shall we stay or shall we go? But this weekend, after the Government’s final briefing of the week, we spent three hours packing up our two-bedroom flat in London and driving out of town. I realise we’re incredibly lucky. Not everyone has the same luxury.
Originally this house was meant to be our main home. We were the new-parent cliché – the couple who moved out of London, which had been our home for more than 20 years, when our daughter, now three, arrived. We bought a house in Chipping Norton and to this day, my husband jokes: “She went to Soho Farmhouse once and decided to live in Oxfordshire” (a dig at me and my impulsiveness).
But, back at work after maternity leave, the commute was ridiculous and we really missed our friends and life in London, so we came back and rented a flat, which we live in during the week.
Now that has all changed again. As we are both working from home, being cooped up with our daughter in a flat with no outside space was just untenable.
So, this week, like so many other townies, we packed up and made our country pad our main home. I don’t feel guilty about it, why should I?
As I write now, I’m looking out into the garden where our daughter is happily playing in the sunshine after spending five days being told she couldn’t go to her nursery. She couldn’t get her head around why everything was changing and why it wasn’t even OK for her to go to our local city park. Now the sun has finally made an appearance we knew the excuse of “it’s raining” would no longer cut it.
I can see there has been a backlash from locals living in areas where city people own second homes; the fear that we could spread the virus and overwhelm small rural communities where resources are in short supply and hospital beds are many miles away. We understand their concerns.
But we also see ourselves as a part of this community. It’s where we brought up our daughter for the first year of her life and made some wonderful friends. Many of our neighbours are elderly (with relatives living miles away) and so the first thing we did when we arrived was offer our help. They kindly look out for our house when we’re not here. This is our opportunity to pay them back.
We’ve tried to be as responsible as we can by bringing all the food from our cupboards at home so we don’t raid any village supplies. We’re self-isolating as much as we can, so we will support the local farming communities by using their delivery services too. We want to help and hopefully this is an opportunity for us to do that.
‘I don’t feel guilty’