A few years back I wrote on our life at Rhubarb cottage out in the tame wilderness of the Cotswolds. I was in the final year of University and often found myself kicking my heels through the long grass that fringed the endless yellow fields of oil seed rape in an attempt to find that elusive first sentence for my essays. Nights were spent poring over nineteenth century ghost stories and considering the feminist aspects of Jane Austen’s work; days were a slow tumble of mud and vegetable growing, raising wild ducklings and wrestling brambles and blackthorn.

Once a week I would catch the bus and sit for an hour watching wide fields and perfect cottages slide past on my journey into Oxford. The dreaming spires breathed into my bones and I embraced the world of words and debate and wine and leather-bound books. Then I would catch the bus home again. An hour which gradually brought me closer to our home, on the edge of a small village made of sand coloured buildings, down a damp track at the end of a terrace made up of derelict houses. All derelict except one. I would step into our tiny cottage, with its frost covered bedsheets and mossy kitchen floor, and the world of sub fusc, pidges and people would slip away, leaving in its place only the taste of woodsmoke and silence.

It was perhaps an odd decision. To retreat from a world so full of delicious, fiery and arrogant youth. I missed out on lots of things. And sometimes I felt it. But mostly, I accepted the trade off. Some people are better off outside.

And then, when the vegetable patch had yielded one full year’s harvest; when the river had crept over its banks and into our garden at least twice; after our ducklings had grown into sleek adolescents and promptly been eaten by the fox; after snowdrifts and storms and blistering summer heat, we left our little cottage and headed west. Further into our outside world.

In between that year and this there have been any number of adventures, failures, tears and triumphs. Some of them I may talk of here, by and by, but nevertheless that place remains special. Not just for its unheated, barely habitable simplicity. But because it marked the beginning of so many things and the end of so many others. And because it was the first time I truly understood what made me happy: mossy floors, woodsmoke, muddy knees, emptiness and leather-bound books.