Down on the farm

Ah, 2007. The year we move back to the UK -- in less than 3 months' time. Which means we need to start looking for somewhere to move to. It turns out that there is such a thing as too much choice and it's incredibly hard to decide where to settle. We started off looking at Lewes and move westwards on a weekly basis. Lewes: too few restaurants. Brighton: too noisy and expensive. Hove: not bad, still in the running, still quite expensive. Worthing: up and coming (words to strike joy into middle-class hearts), but further out and possibly rather dull. Now Winchester has entered the fray, thanks to Papa Dumpling mentioning that it had been rated the best place to live in Britain. And it's not too far from Heathrow -- good for PJ when he's off on one of his many jaunts to the US on Mr Branson's nice airplanes.

Inevitably, in a quiet moment, I turned to the Interwebulator to check out property in Winchester. And found a rather nice six-bedroomed property in the Badger Farm area.* Yes, that's six bedrooms for a couple with no intention of ever having children. But, six bedrooms would mean one for us, one spare, one each for the future kitties, and two home offices -- a necessity, given how many phone meetings we both seem to end up taking. In addition, we have three next-generation game consoles and vast amounts of content to house, so six is starting to look a bit tight. Anyway, I rather pessimistically requested further details from the estate agent via one of those online forms and heard nothing via email (as I'd requested). Plus ca change, etc, I thought -- UK customer service will suck just as much as it does over here. But, amazingly, the further details arrived in the post this evening! Not that they contain much more than was on the site -- in fact, they have fewer of the murky, camera-phone pics snapped by the agent (without the owners bothering to tidy up first -- there's still washing-up in the sink!) than the Web site does. But it's a start.

Still, let's not count our chickens etc. We have yet to sell this place and we haven't yet been to either Worthing or Winchester -- both might appall us, leaving us back at square one. Any other suggestions of places to live -- excluding Stoke Newington?

* Who would farm badgers? And what for? Their tails?