Why?

Why, indeed.

Two jobs, two kids, two cars and two cats since Stripes’ sad demise. We’re a nice family living a nice family life in a nice family house, but it transpires that we’re not happy. Maybe we’ve been watching too many ‘lifestyle’ programmes and have fallen for the con that we’ve got to work at a hundred miles an hour commuting to jobs 30 miles away (each!) to maintain the status quo so that one day we could retire with some level of comfort. I had such hopes for a Labour government after the seemingly endless Thatcher years, instead we seem to be units of tax generation rather than people. Once we were honest enough to admit to each other that we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere a whole raft of possibilities opened up.

The most entertaining is to sell the house (who’d have though that having four toilets isn’t a recipe for happiness?) and buy a narrowboat to live on for a year while we take stock. This has been in our thinking at some level for about twenty years, which is why we have a name for something we haven’t bought yet.

So, this is more of a diary for my benefit than a ‘how to’ guide (and let’s be honest I don’t know ‘how to’ anyway) but feel free to join us on our journey as we find out how much this will cost, whether it’s even possible and what we haven’t considered along the way. It may not be pretty but it will be different and the girls will at least have some memories to torture us with in our old age.

And I’ll still be buying an S-type Jag, obviously.