The office in the loft is now empty. All the eaves are now no more than hollow spaces home to spiders.
I was up there, looking out of the window at the fields and woods that surround us, wondering how it was that I've lived here since I was six, yet I've never walked up the little hill out the back. It's covered in fields except for a crown of woods on its head. I always looked at it and thought to myself 'I must walk up there one day, and look back across the valley and see if I can spot our house', but I never did. It's not as if it's much of a distance away, or even a big climb, it's just that was always there, infinitely procrastinable.
This move is making me view the whole area with the eyes of a stranger. For example, we never used to shop in Ringwood. Ever. Wrong side of the A31. Instead we would go to Ferndown and complain about how few shops there are there. Now that we're moving to Verwood, we're going to be far closer to Ringwood, so we've started shopping there. Got a pass for the car park and everything. Suddenly, we're discovering that the shops in Ringwood are rather good, and that it's not all that difficult to get to at all, even if it is on the wrong side of the A31.
Funny how moving no more than a few miles is like moving countries.
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