Love in the Time of One Dollar

Why my move from the city to the countryside was the best decision I never knowingly made

An *actual* photo of us 22 years ago when we moved to the countryside ;) So young, so few grey hairs…

To explain the meaning of the one dollar (well, pound sterling) reference, I have to take you back more than 20 years. Strap yourself in…

(Heads up: contrary to what the title suggests, my country of residence does not have dollars as its currency. I’m British, we have pounds sterling, but Love in the Time of One Pound obviously doesn’t have the same ring to it. I’m just stunned that I could come up with something that even VAGUELY rhymes with “cholera” and works in this context. That explained, onward with the story…)

Back in 2002, I made the decision to move from London to Devon, South West England after living in the capital for seven years. (To non-Brits: Devon is known for its countryside, moorlands, farming, separate north and south coastlines, surfing, farming, tractors, National Parks, farming, cream teas, farming and more farming.) Sadly, it was not a decision made out of want but a decision made (forced) out of need.

I didn’t want to leave London. I had to. At the time it felt like I had no choice.

At the tender age of 28 I already had a failed, short-lived first marriage behind me. The resulting costs of a wedding and setting up home (not to mention the high cost of London living) left me with a (=deep breath because it makes me feel a bit sick to think about it=) five-figure financial debt. I tried my best to sort myself out where money was concerned, but working in admin within the retail sector is not a well-paying job and will never get you out of a hole that financially deep. After the best part of a year of living alone after our separation, I did a few sums to see how my finances were panning out.

I worked out the feasibility of me being able to continue to live in my London Zone 6 (i.e. the outskirts) studio flat, the one that I rented by myself when husband no.1 and I went our separate ways. My flat was, unfortunately, not a luxurious abode and not anywhere near the centre of the city or where I worked. It was at the edge of London - the county of Surrey, really. Getting to work took one and three-quarter hours daily, first by car, then by train, and finally by foot. The romantic dream I had of living by myself and being fully independent for the first time in my life soon began to wear thin.

I was already skipping Zone 1 (the main centre of the city) on my monthly travelcard in order to make the commute cheaper by half the price each month. It meant a 45-minute walk at the end of the journey from Clapham Junction station to the Chelsea end of the Fulham Road, but I couldn’t afford to continue onto South Kensington’s Zone 1 tube station for the luxury of a five-minute stroll into work. It was the only way I could afford transport.

(As many people find out, London living/working is often not all it’s cracked up to be. If you’re not earning a reasonably high five-figure salary, you’re kinda screwed.)

The shock of London living

The results were worse than I dared to imagine. After calculating my incoming and outgoings, it turned out I had the princely sum of £1 disposable income each month.

That is not a typo. I haven’t forgotten a couple of 0’s. My disposable income was ONE POUND. A single quid.

(Ta-da: THERE’S my one dollar/one pound reference for ya. Talk about crowbarring it in there.)

There was no way that £1 was going to help me pay off the debt I’d accrued from having a big fancy wedding. No way was it going to pay off everything that husband no.1 and I bought to set up home together (maybe if we’d got married after more than our meagre 14 months together we could have amassed homewares more gradually and not felt the need to BUY BUY BUY everything immediately. The marriage was never going to last that long anyway, but that’s a story for another time).

Nor was £1 going to help me have at least a little fun each month and enjoy all that London has to offer in the way of entertainment and going out. Yes, it was 22 years ago, but back in those days one quid still didn’t get you anywhere near a pint of beer. A couple of sips, maybe, but that was about it.

Moving back in with the parents… again

Moving out of London meant one thing for me: the dreaded “moving back in with your parents” scenario. One starter marriage behind me and one steaming, shitty pile of debt was enough for my parents to tell me that I was welcome to move back home anytime if I needed to (I was - and still am - so grateful to them). They’d already guessed the marriage was failing - you can’t hide that when you rock up for Christmas by yourself - but they gained knowledge of the debt when it was word-vomited in an emotional outpouring of Oh-Dad-I-completely-fucked-up-again-because-once-again-I-have-no-money-and-I’ve-spent-a-ton-on-high-interest-storecards-because-I-have-zero-financial-know-how. It was my father who always gently pressed me for information about my finances, knowing - from past stellar performances - that they weren’t my forte.

Result: I cried one tear for every pound sterling of debt. It was a literal crynami.

Once the tears dried and I considered my options, the best option was, sadly (as I saw it at the time), to go back home to live. There were a few problems with this, however:

1. “Home” wasn’t my childhood home. The town I was “from” was about one hour west of London, in Berkshire. My parents had retired and moved to Devon very soon after I left home to go to college (I was the youngest and therefore last of four children to fly the nest). Journey time back to London from parents’ home in Devon: roughly three hours, on a good-traffic day. On a bad-traffic day: anything up to six.

2. The distance might not have mattered were it not for the fact that I’d just started seeing the person who’d eventually end up being husband no.2 (second only chronologically, first and best in every other way). Keith was a born-and-bred Londoner and there was, at that time, nothing down in Devon for him.

3. I was in Devon, and Keith was in London. Despite the relationship being in its infancy, we liked each other. We liked each other a lot.

By all accounts, “nothing down in Devon for him” eventually turned out to be “everything was down in Devon for him”… in other words, me.

Long story short, I moved back in with my parents and with their generous attitude to my paying rent (meaning I paid for my share of bills but minimal to nothing for my lodgings) and little to no need to spend money on going out or luxuries, I managed to pay off my debts pretty quickly. I’d secured a full-time job in Devon before moving down and started it the week after I’d left my London job and when the one-year lease on my studio flat ended. The timing of everything worked out perfectly.

After many months of a long-distance relationship where the two us commuted backwards and forwards between London and Devon, we realised that despite me getting out of debt, Keith and I were NEVER going to afford to get ourselves on the property ladder in London. Living together - in a home of our own - was what we desperately wanted. The success of our relationship was inversely proportionate to our potential to buy a house. The former was a sure thing; the latter was not.

Not in London, anyway.

How we finally got onto the property ladder

18 months after I left London, Keith made the move down to Devon. I could get all mushy here and say that he moved down for love (he did!) - but that went hand in hand with his own financial inability to get on the London property ladder. If we wanted to be together AND buy a house together, it was never going to happen in the capital. I mean, we could have stayed and maybe eventually saved up enough to buy a studio flat the size of a shoebox in some backend-of-nowhere Zone 37, but that did not appeal one bit.

If we wanted to buy, it had to be in (much cheaper than London) Devon. I already had a job there, my parents and half my family were down there, it was the most logical place to be/stay.

(The irony about house prices in Devon compared to London is that although the latter is still far more expensive than the former, an awful lot of people in London either left the city to buy houses in Devon or bought second houses there, thereby pushing up Devon house prices. But wages are incredibly low in the Southwest by comparison so I have no idea how young people manage to get onto the property ladder these days.)

And we were okay with being in Devon, for the time being. One year into Keith living and working in Devon and two years into me doing the same (he’d been renting a one-bed flat a few miles away from my parents’ house), we bought our first home. It was a two-bed terrace in a not-pleasant town and needed a full gut. It had a full-on Seventies interior, but not in a cool, retro way; we’re talking an avocado bathroom, gross, swirly carpet throughout and wood panelling on every wall in the kitchen.

But that’s all we could afford at the time, and we knew we had to get something that needed a complete makeover. And so you can see what we were working with…

The delightful interior of our first home (please note this is the “before”…)

I think the kitchen was even MORE stunning

So, I moved to the country for love. I gritted my townie teeth and moved to the countryside to be with the boy I loved. And being totally honest, we were NOT in love with the countryside. Sure, we were living in a town, but a town in Devon is not the same as living in a particular area (which is akin to a town) of London. London is pockets of areas and postcodes each with its own identity, tube and/or railway station, bars and restaurants, parks, museums and culture. And, more often than not, right next door to the next area, with nothing dividing them. One area simply blends into the next and is no more than a single tube stop or 10-minute bus ride away.

But towns in Devon are quite different. They’re often isolated, separated from the next town by acres of countryside. If one has the misfortune to live in a small town with a high street half-filled with boarded-up shops, a severe drug problem and just one single nice cafe/restaurant - and not even a harbour or beach to enjoy because it’s inland - then one inevitably ends up resenting the town one lives in and clings to the desire to go back to living in the Big Smoke.

And when I say “one”, I mean “me”.

What turned my hate* of the countryside into a love of the countryside was moving to the right town.

(*I have said “hate” for dramatic effect and to counteract the “love” reference… I didn’t actually hate it, there was just zero love there.)

And, like all serendipitous situations, my love for the countryside would eventually overpower any notion of moving back to the capital or life in the home counties¹. And it didn’t just happen to me, it happened to Keith too. Keith - a born-and-bred South (“Sarf”) London boy.

The real love story

It was a given that the two of us were in love and wanted to be together. It wasn’t a given, however, that we’d stay where we’d inadvertently found ourselves living for a long time (14 years in the end). The house we’d bought - an eventually lovely home we lovingly renovated and made our own - was unfortunately in a town we didn’t love. We moved to that specific town for financial reasons (i.e. that was all we could afford), and there’s only so long you can kid yourself you’re loving your home when you step outside it every day and wish it were somewhere else.

What we eventually realised one day was that we finally had the financial means to move somewhere else. It was my mother who, after listening to yet another of my many “bitch moaning sessions” about our town and how it was such a grim place to live, finally snapped one day and said, “Well why don’t you just MOVE then?” - and set the wheels in motion. I have my parents to thank for bailing me out and supporting me many times over the years, and this was another time I was given the push I needed.

The town we picked was one surrounded by beautiful countryside and had lovely shops, cafes and restaurants. It felt right, and we were ultimately proved right to pick this place. Finding a wonderful house in a great town made all our desires to move back to London or the Southeast seem irrelevant and pointless.

So Keith and I didn’t just fall in love with each other - we also fell in love with the countryside. One may have been pretty instant and the other may have been a slow (VERY slow) burner, but I like to think that both are great love stories. London has so much going for it - the culture cannot be beaten. But you need money to truly enjoy London without financial concerns. In contrast, living in the countryside, I see no end of incredible things every day… for FREE. I see deer, herons and woodpeckers. I have a family of hedgehogs living in my garden that I feed regularly. I’m working on befriending the two crows that visit my garden every day.

I’ve seen a beaver² in the wild. I live near an alpaca farm and a donkey sanctuary and hear owls hooting at night. A day doesn’t go by without me seeing some sort of amazing wildlife. And it’s not just wild animals: in the summer months, restored Spitfires fly right overhead (with one single paying passenger) enjoying the view of the Devon countryside. In this county you’re never more than a few miles from the sea, a moorland or an official AONB (area of outstanding natural beauty). Yes, it’s different from London (or any big city), but the city doesn’t have my heart anymore. The country does.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to resist something that’s happening to you in your life, you just go along with it to keep the peace. That’s your own, inner peace. And for me, that inner peace turned into a great love story.

P.S. Try as I might, I will NEVER love the sound of seagulls screeching their guts out when they’re miles from the sea. Your back garden is the seaside, mate. When those crows and I are one, I’m gonna teach them to run those gulls outta town (and country)…

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1. The home counties are generally considered those that surround London, i.e. Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Surrey.

2. We live near the River Otter, the only river in England known to contain a wild breeding population of beavers, a species that died out in Britain in about 1550 (hunted to extinction of course, way to go humans!). The population of beavers was first noticed there in 2013 but its origin is unknown. Although beavers live and breed elsewhere in the UK in large, fenced enclosures, the only two other rivers in the UK with wild, free-ranging beavers are the Knapdale and the Tay in Scotland.