We’re making tentative steps in the house-moving department.  Estate agents keep sending us details of 2 bedroom bungalows, but even though they’re the same price as our 3 bedroom house, even a cat would bang its head on the walls of these properties if we swung it.  We’ve yet to find something better than what we already have.

Sam’s spent many weekends in lock down tarting up the outside of our house in order to make it ready for viewing, but we haven’t yet plucked up enough courage to put it on the market.  Today the scaffolding came down as he’s finished scraping all the moss off the roof, and it’s looking right ready to be sold.  Problem is… there doesn’t seem to be any bungalow just meant for us, and I’m now wondering if we’ll come to regret moving away from the house we’ve lived in for nearly 30 years.

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It was easier on the last house move, as we were both desperate to get out of London.  This time we’re still looking in Suffolk or just into Norfolk for a place to buy, as it will definitely be the last house move we will ever do, and my mother’s voice is in my head telling me not to move away from our sons (Leon lives 3 miles away, and Marc lives 20 miles away) in case we become too decrepit in our old age.  It’s this voice that stops us moving 200 miles away to the Isle of  Wight, the area we’d rather go to.

Leon visited us yesterday and told us to “Go for it and sail off to the IOW if that’s what we want”.  He doesn’t beat about the bush, and maybe he’s looking forward to enjoying his middle years without us constantly badgering him for something.  Not that we would, of course, as Sam is fiercely independent and would have to be in extremis before he asked anybody to help him!  Marc has complained that he’d never see us, and that his kids will miss seeing their grandparents.  He’s due to become a father again in July, and so that’s another reason for us to stay in Suffolk.

I tend to be realistic… I remember what Sam’s mother said when they moved house in their sixties.  The house was eventually totally unsuitable for them, with  many steps up to the front door.  The garden was on a ‘hill’, and she told me she never thought she would ever become incapacitated with age.   I suppose like many people she thought the infirmities of old age wouldn’t happen to her.

So the reality of it is that no, we’ll probably stay close to our sons so that they’re on hand just in case, and also there’ll not be an expensive ferry crossing every time they want to visit us.  Perhaps one day there’ll be a tunnel or a bridge connecting the Island with the mainland, but until then if we ever do move it will probably be to just a few miles from where we are situated now.