I have lived in quite a few flats and houses, or properties as house programmes on the telly will call them. A quick count on my fingers says this is the tenth. I do not want there to be an eleventh because this is the one I want to stay in; it is my perfect house, in a perfect place.
We did the Grand Design thing and bought a small bungalow, knocked it down and built a house – not personally with hard work, hard hats and sweat and cement. The Grand Design similarity ends there because our house is not a thing of beauty made of glass, steel and chrome, a structure that would be admired by cutting-edge architects. It is ordinary on the outside but inside it is just what I want with spacious rooms and views over the countryside. It is smaller than our previous home, but we were down-sizing as our children had left home.
But things change, and we needed another bedroom for visiting family. I thought my shed, The Wendy house, would solve those difficulties and provide me with a real writing room as well as an extra bedroom.
No one wanted to sleep in the en-suiteless shed but I enjoyed this writing room with its view over the pond and got well acquainted with the birds that visited. I was delighted when a heron came to stand sentinel on the bank. A moorhen arrived early one February morning, followed by not one, but two mallard, and when I spent more hours watching them than writing I realised that my writing shed had turned into a hide. I did use my studies of the heron on which to base a short story, Cloaked in Menace. Unfortunately, it won’t find a home – unlike the heron which I now know nests in a heronry some miles away. The story is too dark for a women’s magazine, but not good enough to find a home in a literary competition. And if I’m being honest, perhaps the best bit about it is the title.
