Beacon Hill

I'll change the name a little to help conceal my location.

It's night now, I'm in the drawing room, and from the windows the town glitters below me. This is when the view really sings, you can't make out the individual uglinesses of modernity - it's yellow droplets of light right to the horizon and the train snaking through it all that will, eventually bring my husband back to me.

Around the cottage the inky black of fields and trees has come to feel particularly comforting, it's a private kingdom and I'm the queen - a good feeling. If I were to step outside there'd be a million rustlings and scurryings, some disgruntled hooting of owls- but no neighbours, no cars, no shops, no road -we drive up here in our four wheel drive along the perfect horror story track.

I remember my first encounter with that track. I couldn't imagine the house could be much beyond the green farm gate, and so we parked there, and walked, and walked, with me knowing all the while that this was it, love had hit - it didn't even matter what the house was like because anywhere that necessitated a mile walk off any kind of road had to be mine! As the land grew steeper the town and sky came to a kind of wild crescendo, and though the town's nothing special, the skies in Lincolnshire are. That was one of those days when the clouds go racing across the blue in a desperate hurry to get somewhere. It's a huge expanse of sky here with every shade of blue and pink and yellow annd mauve happening at different times and seasons. The house was built for the sunset on the west and the sunrise on the east, I never miss one these days.

When we finally reached the house, it wasn't proudly sitting on the very brow of the hill as you might expect. It still kept its secret privacy, nestled a little below the brow with the densest and tallest of encircling hedgerows, only the tip of the roof peeked out curiously above the greenery. This gave it the most endearing quality, here I am, on my own on top of a hill, it seemed to say, and yet I'm hiding! I'll try and post a pic. A secret house, up a secret road, encicled magically with protective trees, and yet with the whole world stretched out before it and the winds kissing it from every corner. I loved it already.

We are not beginning at the beginning

In a novel, there's always a convenient jumping off point. In life, it's all so much more blurred and continuous isn't it? I probably should have started this blog when I left London, when my life changed, and history, and solitude, and countryside, and a million period property restoration techniques and products I'd never heard of, became my world.

But it was all too raw and new to be able to dissect it, so I wove my terror into a giant tapestry for 9 months, then stuffed it into a blanket box and forgot about it.

Now I have space and peace enough to disentangle everything that's happened at Beacon Cottage and before and share my thoughts with a warm laptop and maybe a few dear and familiar faces.