Long post coming up, be warned. Skip to the end for the tl;dr.
It’s been a while since I last put thoughts into words here, suffice to say it hasn’t been wasted time. It’s fair to say I haven’t been thinking about houses 100% of the time, but I have stuck to my plan for thinking about houses and doing something house-related every day. I need to work to keep my house geek badge of honour. Or something.
The main point of this post is to explain the happenings of the last but one weekend (days three and four of Project Cooper Acres). I travelled down to Devon, and subsequently Cornwall, for a photo tour weekend, organised by Michael Palmer. Staying at the Home Farm Hotel, there was a cunning plan hatched to spend the Saturday around the Devon area taking photos, and then have the ‘official’ tour with Michael (photo chap) and Russ Hewer (driver chap) of Tailored Tours on the Sunday.
Arriving at the hotel on the Friday evening, a couple of pints of local cider was consumed and a plan to visit Sidmouth and Seaton on the Saturday was hatched by fellow photo tour conspirators and camera nerds PJ Kent, Ryan Doughty and Sheila Morris. My ulterior motive, as well as spending time with real people on a work-free weekend, was to get to know the area more. East Devon and West Dorset are shortlisted on the Where Will Cooper Acres Be Built list. Actually, they are the shortlist. I like the area, albeit what little I’ve experienced of it, and what I’ve seen in Hugh’s never-ending stream of telly and DVDs. In addition to the photos I would be taking, there would be in-depth reportage and other such investigative things going on.
We started in Sidmouth on the seafront. I had a fairly good start on the photography front with a few candids and right-place-right-time shots – you’ll find the full set from the weekend here on my Flickr page – and Sidmouth struck me as a fairly typical south coast seaside town in summer. The weather was pretty meh, overcast clouds, lots of humidity and not really great conditions for fun photography. This was the first time I’d been to a south coast seaside town in high season, naturally I was expecting tourists everywhere and I was right, even despite the yucky weather.
After Sidmouth, we schlepped over to Seaton, home of the trams. The weather was now taking a turn for the worst and intermittent rain was just getting annoying with the associated humidity. I don’t like humidity – no, scrap that, I loathe it. I’m useless in humid environments and I get cranky. And no-one likes a crankypants, least of all 3 people who haven’t spent time with me to get used to my faults and foibles. After 30 or so minutes or so in Seaton, I’d had enough – the weather was just wiping me out and I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s weekend with impending moaning. As something of a British traditional trait, we’re the best in the world at complaining about the weather. No-one comes close.
Two seaside towns done, there was one more that I wanted to visit while I was in the area. This was a little further afield and subsequently involved a 1h45m cross-country drive to get to. Totally worth it, though.
I was keen to get to Crackington Haven, new home of Neil Dixon (beardy type) and Jen Dixon (professional absintheur). Subconciously, I’d been waiting to visit them for some time. I didn’t want to trek out straight from Abingdon as it’s a 3h45m drive and I really wasn’t looking forward to that. Getting to Crackington Haven from East Devon was far easier and faster, so it made sense to use the time I was in the area to pay a visit.
The drive to Crackington Haven was easy. I was expecting small roads full of slow caravans and lost tourists, and I was wrong. The misconceptions about travel infrastructure I had were quickly proven wrong. Truth is, I’d discounted Cornwall as somewhere to live because I thought it was too far from civilisation to be feasible, especially as there are plans to run a home-based business beyond the Internet-related stuff we do now. The drive in was a doddle, and the roads were eerily quite for a weekend in high season.
On the final leg of the journey, I drove through a field of wind turbines. Lots of them. I love wind turbines, I find them magical and they always make me smile. I love the industrial design and the noise they make when they go round. I’m a simple soul, really. After the wind turbines, there were houses with honesty shops at the end of the drive, including locally grown/made jams and vegetables. Brilliant. Not something you get round Abingdon way, in the main.
Arriving at Crackington Haven was a breath of fresh air – literally. Being on the Atlantic coast, the wind coming off the sea was clean, fresh, and a world away from the humidity from earlier in the day. I was in Crackington Haven for two hours, during which time Neil cooked scones (he’s quite the baking ninja), took me to one of the finest beach I’ve seen in my short and sheltered life, and without trying appears to have persuaded me that our new life and new house now belongs in Cornwall.
I drove back to Honiton with mixed emotions. The landscape and locality of north Cornwall is nothing short of perfect for our needs and – frankly – it’s the first place I could see us properly setting up home in, without feeling like we stick out like weirdos.
So, that’s the plan. Live in north Cornwall. Though I will need to take Emma down there to make sure she likes it. The Dixon bed and breakfast service is looking mighty appealing.
tl;dr: we’re going to live in north Cornwall.
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