Big news

Staffan has written a column about it, so on Thursday the news will be out, and there is no point of keeping it a secret any more.

We have bought a house.

I don't know why we have kept it a secret; I guess because of superstition. But last Friday, when I was at The Other Place, Staffan collected the keys. We now own a property in the United Kingdom. But, as the Russian fairy tale formula goes: "It doesn't take long to tell a story, but it takes long to get things done". So I must go all the way back to when we started, and it will certainly take a few installments. It is a very long procedure to buy property in the United Kingdom.

But to everything there is a season. I must go at least six months back. We started looking for a house to buy almost a soon as we moved to Cambridge. All our friends here came with different advice. Every week, we picked up a free property brochure at Tesco. We looked up property sites. We even actually went to see a house, right across the street from here. Yet we couldn't really start looking before we had sold our old house. Instead we drove around and looked at places. I had this idea that I wanted to live in a village. My dear friend Jean Webb lives in a lovely cottage in a village far away from everything. I had a vague dream of living in a genuine English cottage, maybe even with a thatched roof. There are plenty of thatched roof houses around Cambridge, and some are for sale, so it is not a completely impossible dream. But to begin with, we just drove around to get a sense of the various places.

To be continued...

Dream house?