Saxon Road London SE25 - How it looks today.
Here I am, collecting boxes and getting ready to pack up my small home ready for another move. Having come down to live in a small seaside town in Devon to be near my ageing mother, I’ve now actually found a bungalow in her street and I’m moving there very soon. Each time I move L think this will be my next to last. I say that because, when my mother has passed on, I do intend to buy my final home on the coast just outside Edinburgh, my favourite city, and home to my eldest son and his family.
But, let’s face it, I’ve always been a gypsy and I’ve moved so many times. Saxon Road (see above) was where I lived from the age of 3 till the age of 9, one of the three homes I can remember living in in South London. Then when I was 12 my parents moved to Sidmouth in Devon which I found heavenly for a while till I finished school and scooted back to London as quick as I could.
La Simonette, our happy small farm for 5 years in the South of France. With my two sons and two dogs.
I lived in Beckenham, Woolwich, Bromley and Chelsea in a period of 2 and a half years and then in Easton, Totterdown and Clifton in Bristol over the next 18 months (having got married in between times). But the countryside was calling and North Devon was the next destination where we lived and had two children in Chittlehampton, Chelfham, Umberleigh and Barnstaple.
It became time to move to France, August 1978, where, after travelling around for a bit we settled in the small village of Le Pegue for a few months before moving to a lovely small farm, La SImonette (see above) where we had 5 happy years just outside the truffle capital of Richerenches.
My dad playing with my boys in the pool at Buisson.
I had a business that was going well and the boys were growing up and we had the chance of moving into a converted mill just outside the village of Buisson and stayed there for 6 years, years that flew by as we were very busy working hard and playing hard. But suddenly the Australian owner of the business went bust and I drove back to the UK to find work, firstly in Devon and then in the New Forest in Hampshire. My wife and youngest son came to join me but after three years (and several addresses) I was head-hunted to run a school back in North Devon. My son went back to France, my wife went back there too, I fell out with the school’s owner and ended up in Bristol where my eldest son was now living.
Lovely Woodsmoke in Abbots Leigh just outside Bristol, my first house with Liz.
In Bristol I gained a new partner, Liz, and over the next 8 years we lived in 7 different places together, 3 outside the city and the rest in the area of St Andrews and Montpelier. These houses got bigger and bigger as we tried to have room for her children and mine (when they came to stay). And then I got very ill and suddenly that was all over. I finished my time in Bristol living alone, first right in the centre and then in Bedminster. Then in September 2010, I retired and moved to Devon to keep an eye on mum.
If you followed all that, a simplified version, there were in all about 40 different addresses where I received mail. Have I had enough of moving………..I’m certainly stripping down what I carry with me these days : two men and a van will be enough to move me. And my next move will be my last (he says, optimistically).
