I said that to Paula in November 2016, shortly after her mum died. Being two intelligent people prone to stupid, almost reckless, actions at times this was not an uncommon desire - to escape society; whether we'd have the balls to go through with it was another matter entirely.
If you'd asked my four closest friends in Northampton during my last few years there, only Phil (One El) seemed to genuinely believe we could do it. Roger barely entertained the idea outside of a kind of fanciful 'what if we won the lottery' way and Tony was the only person who said he didn't know if it was a good idea and would be sad to see me go. Jones, our 'joint' bf friend, was happy to look after the dogs when we came up here a year ago to see if we could do it; and she talked about it in an excited way, but you could tell from the last few weeks we were in Northampton it was something she kind of didn't think was ever going to happen... And I think that's the weird thing. I think we became this 'fixture' in Shoesville; yeah, we might not have been the party animals we once were and we hardly saw anybody any more, but Phil and Paula up sticks and fuck off to Scotland? Really? You're having a laugh? They're part of the fittings.
I still have to pinch myself. I said to the wife on the way back from the beach last week that sometimes I have a double-take moment where, like some acid flashback, I go, 'Wow. I actually do live here!'
The fact I was driving up here less than 12 months ago - February 13, 2017 - with the intention of buying a house almost seems like a fanciful load of nonsense; a waste of money; an exercise in nothing apart from having our first weekend away from dogs in over 25 years. The fact I'm writing this from the inside of my house, in Wigtown, in Dumfries and Galloway, in Scotland, says so much more than Mr Verbosity here ever could.
Yes, it was reckless. Paula gave up a 30+ year 'career' with HMRC; I gave up being unemployed and on the verge of incandescent rage for a more laid back unemployed chill. The wife sleeps a lot - she likes sleep; it's acting like some Tax Office detox. We've barely had a cross word. She's a wee bit weirder than I ever thought she was, but I know what I'm like and I'm gobsmacked she hasn't killed me yet; because this is pretty much the first time, apart from holidays, we've spent 24/7 in each others' company.
I am never ever going to say, "The scenery is getting boring". I'm probably never going to really moan about the beer, even if I may never have Oakham or Newby Wyke again. Of course there are things I miss about civilisation, but the longer I go without them the less I care. Availability is the only hurdle here, most things not in shops are obtainable via mail order, if you want to trust the internet with your shekels.
It rains here. Not yer average rain; but rain that seems to like ramming it home about how bleedin' wet it is. It's windy too and as a vegetarian I know a few things about wind. The thing is... begonias are perennials here. I don't know if that's a scientific thing, but in Shoesville if I left my begonias out throughout the winter, the first frost would turn them into some kind of brown sludge, never to be seen again. Up here they're so hardy they pop up every year unaffected by the cold.
The previous paragraph is not an obscure euphemism.
Buzzards! Birds of prey. Herons. (non-flying) Deer. (avoidable) Vet's bills. Foxes, woodpeckers, kingfishers, feral sheep, great egrets... fuck me it's like a zoo up here with no cages and pragmatic medical practitioners. It's an animal place, just keep your eye on your long dog because it doesn't pay for it to be a wanker up here.
It also doesn't appear to be as dark as I expected. A lot of this has to do with living near the sea - flat horizons, you see - so light hangs in the sky much longer than it would in the Midlands. As a result, despite dawn and twilight's dreariness, I haven't felt like winter's dark glove has enveloped me this year. This might have to do with my ... comfort with living here. I don't know if 'comfort' is the word I want. I do feel comfortable, but I also feel at ease and 'at home'; that might have something to do with the fact that my father's family originated from this neck of the woods, so in a existential way, I have come hame. I can't help hope that May, June and July will be well worth experiencing - I like daylight and I expect to see a lot of it.
'Everything is bigger here.' Says the wife, often.
'Yes, but it isn't Texas...'
I am of the opinion that germs are harder and considerably nastier up here - all that deep-fried Irn Bru. As a result, in six months I've had two nasty viruses and the wife, who simply doesn't do 'ill' has been ill twice as well. A lot of this is down to the 'holiday' factor - you relax and your body becomes a target for every nasty bug - and some of it is to do with new and countrified germs (like starting work at a school) that town germs simply are outclassed.
Christmas was awful. I hate admitting it because it wasn't supposed to be. You know; it was supposed to be great - our first Scottish Christmas and New Year in the adopted home of festivities. But the wife got ill in the lead up and I got ill once the main day was history. Since then it has been more like lurching from one day to another rather than recovering. A good day was followed by a bad one and then I slipped a disc. I'm not sure how I did it; I think it might have been getting out of bed. Then, in what might be seen as a foolhardy thing to do, we both dragged ourselves to a pub quiz and the half of the team that hadn't succumbed to germs caught up with everyone else and left me thinking I'm never going to recover this time around...
I'm pretty convinced I would have been ill in Northampton and I may have been worse factoring in various things. The thing is, I had a mild cold that took me off my feet for a fortnight back in October. This new thing has already lasted three weeks and has only recently shown signs of letting up. The best advice we've been given this winter is 'get out more' and we had massive intentions to do just that, but at the moment taking the dogs down the beach has become like mobilising for war and subsequently we still haven't got out except for shopping and the pub quiz. It should be pointed out that we wouldn't be or aren't any different than we would have been back in Shoesville - geography is just a thing in this case and not a factor.
If I'm waffling it's because I can.
The other day, something happened that was both completely out of character and weird; I also think it was something of a watershed moment. I was driving into Newton Stewart to pick up something from the Argos collection point (the closest Argos is 25 miles away, so they have a 'relationship' with Sainsburys to distribute their wares). I was on the A714; it is the main arterial route for Wigtownshire. If this road is blocked there are ways out but many of them have cows or sheep or both on them. Up ahead of me, about 3 miles out of Wigtown there were roadworks; it looked like they were filling potholes - YAY! - there was a bunch of workmen and two lads holding Stop/Go signs. I got the stop sign and sat there while the oncoming traffic filed past me and when they finished the lad holding the Stop/Go sign gave me a little wave and I waved back, smiling. At the other end, the older lad holding his sign also waved at me and I waved back and mouthed 'Thank You' at him and he put the thumbs up...
100 yards further down the road, I burst out laughing; almost hysterically. The only words that escaped my gob were, "What have you done with the real Phil Hall" before laughing even more hysterically. In Northampton, I would have been sitting in my car HATING the workmen, the fact they were out when I needed to be somewhere, hating the council, hating people - HATE HATE HATE APOPLECTIC HATE!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!!!!
Gone. It isn't there any more.
My brother Ron has phoned me three times in the last two months; that's twice more than he usually phones me a year. He asked me, in a genuinely loving way, last time, what I'd done with his brother.
I laugh a lot. We have no income at all; we've both put weight on (and I'm still suffering with a bad back over two weeks since it popped) - and yet, I'm... really fucking happy.
I miss my mates. It's been six months since I saw any of them. But I wouldn't swap this for them. Sorry guys, I love you all dearly, but this is home for me now. It feels right and I've stopped frowning and started smiling. I've had a shitty couple of months health wise, but the pros up here outweigh the cons by such a margin it isn't even worth contemplating.
When I drive to Newton Stewart, this is my view:
I can't really imagine finding that boring.
I might never be able to climb one of these hills without taking a week and oxygen canisters, but I can sit and look at them until the cows come home and long after that. Driving to the beach I get awesome views; at the beach I get awesome views; go to the Machars get awesome views; drive down through Bladnoch and get a view that could be Trumpton in Switzerland on acid ... Views don't pay the rent (well, they might), don't put food on the table and you can't have a good conversation with them, but I wouldn't swap them for anything.
We've made some friends. A few of them are great, a few of them are a bit weird and probably wouldn't be friends if we were in Shoesville and a few of them are barking mad... actually, we're all barking mad, because we moved here. You need to be a little insane to give up your old life for 1970.
While Scotland has been buried under snow, we've been wet with a hint of sleet every so often. In fact, I've been a reet nerd and have spent the last six months comparing the weather in DG8 with the weather in NN3 and, do you know, there's not been a lot in it. A couple of degrees in temperature some of the time; but NN3 has had a shit load more snow than we have in Wigtown. Those swings and roundabouts get all over the place...
I need to get well enough to feel confident to get a part time job. The wife needs to do the same because inactivity is worse for her than it ever was for me. We are still waiting for general work to be quoted on, let alone done, and there is a worry that should a pipe burst or something life threatening happens then we might struggle to get a local tradesman out before we've started decomposing, but, you know, there's less people living in this entire county than there is living in Northampton. It's not really an excuse, but it is a logistics issue.
I like the A75 - the main trunk road from the M6. From the Gatehouse of Fleet it is possibly one of the most picturesque routes I've ever travelled. It has a total WOW factor, especially from Carsluith, where you get to see my town, less than 3 miles as the crow flies, but still another 17 miles by road. You have Wigtown bay on your left and the southern uplands on the right, oh and lots and lots of trees. It is nature's way of calming even the angriest of souls.
Wigtown is 100 miles from Wigton in Cumbria. It is 338 miles from Fullingdale Road in Northampton to my new front door. It is 55 miles from Dumfries - the county town (that is about the same size as Kettering). Because it's in the bottom left hand corner of Scotland it is one of the remotest parts of the country that is technically not remote at all; we're just a long way from anywhere and Stranraer - the closest 'big' town is smaller than Daventry. My new chum Ian calls it 'Bedford by the Sea' and the fact it has a crappy one-way system, lots of empty shops and a drug problem means his description isn't far off being 100% accurate.
There's an Indian restaurant in Newton that is now run by Asians. Rather hilariously, the old 'Indian Kitchen' was run by a local Scottish guy, who used to buy his curry sauces from Aldi - apparently this isn't an urban legend or a tall tale. There are two Chinese restaurants there as well, but one is apparently much better than the other. There's an Italian cafe; a new-age hippy cafe and a posh restaurant owned by a man whose house we viewed in February.
That's our local proper town; here in Wigtown we have a garage and another garage that only does repairs. It has a Co-op. About a dozen book shops; a community charity shop; three antique shops; four bespoke cafes, plus a further half a dozen hiding in the back of shops and hotels. There's a bar which caters for the Tenants loving locals, and a hotel bar that caters for beer snobs like me. There's a butcher's, a library, three churches, a Masonic Hall, a golf club and a defunct harbour. There's an engraver, a chemist, a PO, an expensive hippy gift shop and public loos. There's a doctor's practice that you can almost touch from my back garden (when it isn't under water) and there was a bank that is being transformed into affordable housing units for young people. It also has an award-winning primary school, a closed pub - The Grapes - and if you drive into Bladnoch - like a suburb of Wigtown with some fields and a hill* dividing it - there's a pub that sells good beer and does reasonable food, a service station with the most expensive petrol you have ever seen and a whisky distillery, as well as an industrial estate with local businesses.
I really expected to know if it was a good decision moving here inside 6 months and I can quite categorically state it was the best decision we have made in the last 20 years. If you want a career then this isn't the place for you unless you're an expert in ferries or wood. If you can vet or can supply a needed service that isn't already catered for then you have a fighting chance. You need to come here with a wad of cash in the bank and not treat it like a holiday - we're still remarkably frugal, even if I've allowed myself to get fat. If you own your house in London, you can buy a three-bed detached Victorian town house for about £130k and have enough cash in the bank to mean you will only really need a part time job to pay your council tax and food.
* The hill, which is part of the golf course, is called Phillip Hill.
And there you have it. The first six months verdict. If I had to score it, I'd be fair and give it 8 out of 10 with much room for improvement once shit is out of the way. Huzzah!
Now, go and do something with your life that's exciting or you'll regret it.
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