What is your ideal place to live?
When I was eighteen I was desperate to leave home and to live in London. A city, a great big city, buzzing and alight all night long, was clearly the only place to be. Now I live in the country and in between times I have had all sorts of houses but until now they all shared one thing: whether close to the centre or farther out into suburbia, they were somehow or other in cities. I didn't really mean to live in cities after that first determined flight from the nest, it just happened. Cities were where the work was so London, Birmingham and Manchester all became, at various times, home. Eight years ago we moved here. That was a very determined move too, a deliberate choice to live in the country and to undertake a big move while we still had the energy both to make it happen and to live it when it had happened. Is this my ideal house? Well in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't but it is a very good house and I love lots of things ...