Life in a Different Home

Its challenges, its rewards

From the our living room window I see in the distance about a two hundred metres away a large gherkin-shaped evergreen tree. I have yet to determine the species. My view of the lower part of the tree is bisected by the edge of a building of uncertain age in pale cream-coloured stone. The tree stands in a small cemetery beyond. The building may once have been a chapel but is now an apartment block owned by the Baptist Church.

I cling to that view, its formal elegance, to replace my view of Roy and Rose’s house with its pleasant honey-coloured front door, the scattering of white houses a mile beyond on the slopes of Goodwick, and a glimpse of the sea. The clinging is a symptom of the anxiety of living in a different house in a different town. We have now been here since 5 December 2024. I’m writing this, my first blog post for a long time, appropriately enough on 1 January 2025.

Apart from the bisected tree the view west from the living-room window is uninteresting, if inoffensive – a narrow road with redbrick houses one side and various wooden gates and fences and tall hedges the other. The houses are in the same style as ours, plain, simple, and all slightly different. The view east from one of our bedrooms is more rewarding – the backs of a continuous row of substantial, respectable old houses roofed with ‘double-roman’ tiles (a tile name I only recently learned from my son) with pleasant-looking gardens.

Each house in the row is different, some with gables facing one way, some the other, some plain stone, some with white-painted rendering. There are fascinating miniature gables, lean-to extensions, tall chimneys. Beyond the ridge of the nearest I see the top of an elegant street lamp on satisfyingly-named Horse Street. The neighbour whose garden backs on to ours called a few days to introduce herself, slender, with straight grey hair, probably in her seventies, and said the yew hedge (a yew hedge!) between us would soon be trimmed from her side. Soon indeed – the job has been done, and I restlessly await the trip back to Wales for the rest of our stuff, especially the garden shears to finish the hedge trimming. It will be my first exercise in trimming yew.

There’s something familiar about this strange slack holiday period, especially in our incomplete transition from Wales and the frustration of familiar equipment missing. I remember a dull Sunday in Wichita when we first arrived, before I started work, the Lazy R Diner in the street outside the Commodore Hotel, the Sunday paper with Richard Burton’s choice of poems such as ‘Miniver Cheevy.’ And wet afternoons in Blackley when I was six with not enough to occupy me.

Apropos Blackley, I feel more urban here that in Fishguard, driving to the tip, B&Q, Yate shopping centre. We’re both, Rosemarie and I, in need of more rural scenes, and look forward to the Arboretum and National Trust gardens. But at least yesterday – quite by accident, not knowing B&Q has a garden centre – we bought a hellebore, some thyme, and lavender, which when weather and health permit we will plant in the front.

Ah yes, health. I see in this house signs and small artifacts betraying the presence of Ann, the late former owner, and realise it will be from here we go forth to feed the flames. But in what order? Ah, leave that thought. For now, we are alive, and we need to eat. Our kitchen is becoming familiar, with its view of the long medieval back spaces behind buildings on Broad Street, and is quite convenient to work in. On with the motley.