Dreary me

I've been looking for a new place to live for quite a while.  The brief: home counties, outside or in a bustling village, a whole house (pre 1940), working fireplaces and a big kitchen.  Most importantly it had to be commutable - i.e. less than 40 minutes into central London.  I did find somewhere six months ago, it was a dreamy house in the middle of nowhere alongside a beautiful lake, sadly Mr C would spend at least two hours a day travelling there and back.

My research so far has all been online but after three weeks of house arrest Mr C was fit and able enough to drive us to one of the locations we've been looking at.  I was so excited, at last we were going to see the place where we might end up living.  The cottage we went to look at was in a small village in Buckinghamshire.  It looked so cosy with its thatched roof and white washed walls, I had visions of me skipping up and down the high street with JJ (see previous) purchasing my wares from the butcher, baker and errr candlestick maker?  We pulled into the tiny village that certainly looked lovely but didn't have my butcher, baker etc, just a row of shops containing a barely there Co-op and a chinese take-away.

We found the lovely cottage next door to the one of only two pubs in the area. So there we sat in the pub, next door to the lovely cottage with its pub garden bordering onto the cottage(!); we ordered some lunch and took in the surroundings (a signed picture of the previous Inspector Barnaby).  Well aside from the picture I didn't take in anything apart from the fact that I felt a little sick.  Here we were in the quiet little village I'd been banging on about for six months and I thought please can we eat up and get out of here.  I had visions of snow on the ground and Mr C and I living a kind of The Shining existence.  

Please note pub on immediate left....

We ate, paid and left.  Still feeling a little optimistic about what we might find we decided to have a drive around the area and look at some of the other villages.  It was just awful I couldn't see myself living in any of these places that I'd spent all these months researching.  The countryside was beautiful but you then hit these small towns, it was the same everywhere - huge housing estates, pretty town houses, town centre, high streets with half their shops empty.  

So after doing half of Bucks in about an hour we headed back to London.   We discussed the places we had visited and I just got more and more agitated.  I can't do it, I can't do it!  The villages I like with the butcher, baker etc and the beautiful stone houses aren't here, they're at least an hour by train out of London or sitting quaintly on the south coast (Fowey, Salcombe etc).

Of course there are the odd houses dotted about in the beautiful countryside which I love but I only have to think of a creaking old house when Mr C is away (sometimes three weeks at a time in some far flung destination) that I get a little worried.  Late at night, pitch black darkness and wind lashing around the house with me hiding under the bed til morning.

Oh god, what are we going to do?  This morning I thought if we can't have a stone house in a pretty village in errr The Cotswolds then we're staying in London.  There has to be a lovely place on the outskirts that doesn't have a gang of hooded dudes slouching past your front door morning, noon and night.