Cherry on top: a day out in the garden of England

One of the highlights of our frequent house hunting trips (and one of the reasons I would love to move to the country) is the frequent make-shift signs that we pass along the way. Depending on the season, there’s firewood and kindling for sale, manure, fresh eggs, seedlings and fruit stands galore. We passed via Tunbridge Wells this weekend, and every lay-by boasted its own cherry stand.

Cherries are my all time favourite fruit and I like to eat them just as they are, although my mother-in-law made Jo Wheatley’s delicious Boozy Essex Frangipane Tart at the weekend. So if any of my cherries had made it through (they didn’t – it’s a miracle they lasted long enough for me to take a photo), I would have made that… yum.

How it all began

© Sin Bozkurt 

Well hello there.

Having barely recovered from the trauma that was wedding planning, and fresh back from the most amazing honeymoon ever, I caught my new husband looking at porn. Property porn.

I’ll freely admit to being property obsessed (well, duh – I married my estate agent) but I would like to point out at this juncture that he started it!

For although I’ve nagged my poor, long-suffering husband for a country idyll of my own for nigh on five years, I had mentally shelved ‘the dream’ for the foreseeable future. Having said that, I jumped right back on that bandwagon with not so much as a backwards glance.

So 10 days into ‘official’ married life, we were heading down the A26. Again. The route was familiar to us; in the run up to our wedding, we’d spent many a fraught Saturday driving through the Sussex countryside in a mad organizational frenzy.

Needless to say, we did not find our dream home that day. But the nugget of an idea was sown. Boy, how my husband must regret that fateful Rightmove search now.

A year later, a hell of a lot of searching (both soul-searching and house hunting), a fair few ‘discussions’, a couple of tantrums (mine), one very helpful mortgage advisor and three failed property purchases later and we’re still looking.

Wish us luck!