Exchange

Finally - It's happened. I exchanged contracts this afternoon. It feels oddly flat after all the trauma over so many months. I celebrated with a mug of tea & two chocolate digestives.

So, I will exchange my rural life, for city life. It's a really big step after 34 years in the country. The one thing I won't exchange is my friends who have been really supportive through all the ups & downs of this over about 16 months. I hope I will manage to keep all of them, even if I don't see them so often.

I have had a great team behind me too - my legal man Gareth & my money man Tim. Both have really gone out of their way to help and advise. My legal man took my file home with him at the weekends when things went pear shaped & phoned me in the evenings too. Not many lawyers will do that. In the case of my money man he even coped with the fact that I can't add up & was thousands adrift in my calculations of what I needed to find. Magically the cash will appear. The team at the vendors agents, Penny & Sinclair, were brilliant too, even though I'm not really their client. It felt as if they were interested in helping me personally, not just because they would get a hefty commission. There are really nice people in the world & I'm sure they outnumber the ones who aren't nice at all. They are just quiet about it.

Being a bit OCD my next move will be to do an accurate plan & scale furniture so I know where everything should go. I'll also know if I need to get rid of anything else before I move. But that part of it all is fun.

The serious point to emerge is that I'm really glad I did this now before I had to. It has been hard from the beginning, much worse than I anticipated in my optimistic way. I realise that I probably wouldn't have been able to do it in another 10 years or if my health deteriorated. I am hopefully young enough to be able to make a new life & some new friends.

Thank God it's sorted. Couldn't have stood it for much longer.