We started the bank holiday early by finishing work mid-afternoon and driving to Beverley for a stay over. Beverley is a beautiful old market time which still has a thriving market today, lovely old buildings and the beautiful Minster. We stumbled accross this peaceful hidden garden that belongs to the Minster and is open to the public as a place for some quiet time. A place to "sit and think the right kind of thoughts" in the words of an interesting old lady we got talking to whilst we were there.
Spending time in the garden gave us ideas for our own. I really do long for a peaceful, private garden of my own filled with flowers, vegetables and maybe chickens one day. I listened with envy the other day as my craft club friends talked about the work they were doing in their gardens and allotments at the weekend, and the pleasure of seeing things start to grow. I’ve been discouraged from growing much in my front yard this year (it’s back to back house so there’s no back yard) as things have been stolen, including a bench. I may get some bright, easy flowers though to cheer the space up, and I’ve got a couple of pots of hardy herbs growing. I’ve got a pot of chocolate mint growing on my kitchen windowsill along side a tomato plant, and even though that’s the full extent of my vegetable garden at the moment it’s still exciting watching them grow. Really, it is!
The house – and garden – hunt has slowed down a little. We’d booked a viewing of a new build for this Saturday coming but when we went for a quick look on Monday we saw that someone had smashed the front window; not a good sign. We walked around the near by streets and it looks quite rough and run down. I looked more deeply into the crime statistics for the area and found that an alarming number had been reported in that one street of new builds alone. It’s also occurred to me that one of the reasons I want to move away from where I live now is that it’s quite high density, which gets noisy and even aggressive in Summer, when people are hot and crammed together without their own space. The new build house is surrounded by block after block of flats, so that’s going to be even higher density housing than where we are now.
Back to the drawing board. It’s disheartening but I know two things. One, however many little setbacks we encounter we’re still making progress because we’re constantly learning about what we do and don’t want, and about all the legal processes involved. Two, we’re privileged to even be in this position of potential home ownership; a few years ago I thought we’d never be able to do this and here we are, looking for a home to call our own. So many people live in insecure or low standard accommodation, and I need to make sure I never loose sight of how fortunate I am to be in this position. In other words, struggling to find our new homw is most definitely a first world problem, up there with over soaking one’s quinoa.