Real life | 3 November 2016

For three months after I move to the country, I am told, I am going to be in the most almighty panic.

I will ask myself repeatedly what on earth I have done. I will have sleepless nights worrying that I should never have left London. I will wake in a sweat in the early hours gripped by the idea that I cannot possibly survive now I am not ten minutes’ walk from the Northcote Road.

And then, magically, one day, about three months in, I will wake up in my country cottage and look out of my bedroom window at the sea of green and say, ‘This is the best decision I have ever made.’

I’m really glad a few friends who have done this move have talked me through it, because I panic at the best of times. So the scale of the panic I will have after selling my flat to move to a cottage near the horses is likely to be monumental, cataclysmic, thermonuclear.

Never mind that I have been contemplating this move for an age. The idea is now a reality. I have a cash buyer, and my offer has been accepted on the dream cottage. It is happening.

And so with the major negotiations over, some finishing touches of research are vital. Because in my experience of being me, it is always the most unlikely, the most unusual, the most ridiculous and bizarre eventualities that put a spanner in my works.

Therefore, I must knock on the door of the house next door to my dream cottage and find out who lives there. It is just my luck that the only green-haired leftie in Surrey answers the door and reveals, during a conversation about the right of way round the back of her house to my garden, that she is a card-carrying member of Momentum just back from Calais where she has been helping Lily Allen adopt 38-year-old child refugees.