One major reason we chose The Eden Valley as a place to live (aside, of course, from its stunning beauty, varied terrain and abundant wildlife) was that a couple of dear friends had made a similar move several years before. Every time I read their Facebook updates I would feel a strange mixture of joy, envy and optimism. What a life they were leading! From the same part of London as us to a tiny village at the foot of a fell, they seemed to have made the transition comfortably and were busy entering fully into local activities and the life of a small community, including allotment owning, a book club and running a monthly film night in the village hall.
Sharon, a novelist who works from home, would go for lunchtime walks up the fell and take beautiful photos of the views. Her husband, Adam, fulfilled his dream of owning a second-hand bookshop, the excellent Withnail Books in Penrith, and the satisfaction they felt in this new life was clear in every communication I had from them. Once a year I would visit them and marvel at the happiness they’d found.
When the time came for our own move we started looking in the only part of Cumbria I was at all familiar with, the villages and towns in the Eden Valley, close to Adam and Sharon’s village of Croglin.
Croglin, for all its beauty and idyllic rural location, doesn’t have a pub (at least not one that opens with any regularity). Kirkoswald has two. It also has a doctors’ surgery and a small general store. This was the obvious place to start, and as luck would have it, we didn’t have to look any further. We’d made note of a handful of rental properties to view, but once we saw Ivy Cottage we canceled those viewings and filled out an application.
Our cottage is old, cold and damp, but full of character, and it sits on the edge of the village, with a view of fields and hills. It provides more living space than either of us has had to ourselves before, including a spare room which doubles as a studio for me. The closest I came to having a separate art space before the move was a tiny shed on the patio of our shared house. Now I have a sunny room for all my art materials and desk, and views of lambs frolicking outside while I work.
The first week we moved (March 2016) we had no heating. We didn’t even have logs for the stove in the living room. We wore many clothes to bed and huddled by a small electric heater when we got dressed in the mornings. You could see your breath in every room in the house and we had no idea when the delivery of heating oil would arrive. Eventually it did, of course, and we soon began to feel at home with all our things around us. We would go for walks and on returning to the village would look down the hill at the little main street with its pubs and red stone houses, and say “I can’t believe we live here”. We still say this.
One day in the summer I went for a run. Half way to Croglin I had to stop to let a flock of sheep pass me on the road. In London, any interruption to my runs would cause me to panic and do that annoyingly pointless jogging on the spot that city runners do at traffic lights. Stopping, waiting and catching your breath is no bad thing when you’re just out for a gentle recreational jog, and I was happy to watch the sheep bundling past me along the country lane. I took a picture. I tweeted it.
Later that day a reporter from the local paper contacted me. He’d seen my tweet and thought that a city artist moving to the country would make a nice story. He gave me a lovely write up and a double page spread, and as a result of that I was commissioned to produce a large picture for a client to give her husband as a gift. Never underestimate the power of Twitter.
The most exciting thing to happen in our first year in Cumbria was Teddy. Getting a cat was always part of our plan but we needed to settle in, and get permission from the landlord. As soon as we paid our pet deposit and got the letter of permission we headed to the local rescue centre, Eden Animal Rescue. In an enclosure with three other kittens was the most beautiful tabby and white little girl. She purred when we picked her up. Within minutes of arriving home she had established herself, quite calmly, as a member of the household.
I can now hardly remember a time when I didn’t have to make frequent checks to see if Teddy was chewing the cellophane packaging on my greetings cards, or stepping onto a work in progress with muddy feet. She loves to drape herself around my neck while I’m at my desk and dribble happily onto whatever I happen to be working on. She naps on the spare bed while I draw, and grumbles in her sleep. She comes not just onto, but into our bed at night (yes, we totally indulge her) and crawls down under the covers next to me. She bites us when we don’t give her breakfast early enough, and leaves dead shrews under the tv. We can’t get enough of her.
Recently I have been on sick leave from the bakery due to tendonitis in my right arm. I have used this time to really work hard at increasing my profile on Twitter, trying to drum up new commissions, and creating artwork that I can sell as prints (a watercolour of our local pub, which is proving quite popular). Going back to the factory will be tough, but I’ve had a taste of the freelance lifestyle and my most fervent desire is to become a full-time artist and illustrator. I want to manage my own time, do the things I love, spend more time in my lovely home, in my lovely village, with my lovely boyfriend, and sell things that make people happy. Maybe this coming year will bring me one step closer…