It was an offer to good to refuse - so we didn't. My friend and colleague Paula, with her fella Adam, are off on a 7 month overseas odyssey of their own, and they needed someone to take care of their chickens and Adrian ze bad-cat (yeah mum, I know, me and cats...), and to help keep the mortgage ticking over while they are away. Mates got, well, mates rates. So for slightly less than it was costing us to share in Oxford, we now have our very own 2 bedroom, heritage listed, GORGEOUS cottage in Witney, about 7 miles from Oxford, complete with massive long skinny back garden (so very english!) and the aforementioned pets.
I'll be honest, Ants was more keen on moving to Witney than I. Witney is a pretty little market town (settled since pre-Roman times, and made affluent for the past 1000 years by the wool and fabric milling industries, as I've learned recently), but Witney today is very much the home of the great English suburban dream: materialism is God here and I've afraid there won't be much to do except shop (not my thing) and eat bad English food (even less my thing!). A lot of people I work with live in Witney (and I have already started bumping into them in my trakkies at the local Sainsbury's - supermarket) while nearly everyone I count as a friend is back in Oxford town.
We wouldn't do it at all if we didn't have a car: a trip to the Half Moon takes less than 20 minutes in Anthony's little red beastie, the Scirocco, but would take the best part of an hour if we had to catch the bus and then walk down to the pub at the other end.
But the house, as you'll see below, is lovely, I know there is at least a decent Thai place in town, and some of the pubs definitely have potential. Anthony is particularly excited about the fact that there's a longbow archery club nearby - and the back yard is big enough to swing a sword in, as long as the chickens are safely in their run when we do it...
So, all things considered, even I'm excited...
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