For those of you that give a shit, or read this nonsense and still remember me, you might be thinking where has he gone? The Minister of The Ministry of Shrawley Walks. And you’d be forgiven for thinking that i’d fallen off the edge of this Flat Earth we all live upon, given the utter tripe i’ve been spouting for the last 3 years.

But the good, or bad news, depending on your viewpoint, is that we’ve moved house from Shrawley to Clifton Upon Teme. Go on stalk me, I don’t care, could probably do with publicising my new village and soon to be new role in the Northern part as “The Count of Clifton” some may say the O isn’t needed and they are welcome to their views, but for now I shall be broadcasting from a thousand metres high and from the edge of humanity, out beyond the safety of our patio doors lie uncharted lands, at the moment singular solitary dog walks, with only some headphones and my phone for company instead of M, N and previously C; Benny still remains of course, the mental odd looking thing, “Nice Cat” someone said to us when we first walked him into Worcester. I mean, who walks a cat for Christ’s sake?

So after the most stressful 2 weeks of my life, from 4 Dec to 18th Dec, when the house move was, or possibly wasn’t going ahead, was the house going to be any less of a building site than it was during these two weeks, the solicitors not speaking to me, each other or anyone from what I could make out. Having to drive into Dudley in the rush hour to hand deliver signed paperwork my solicitor’s company had misplaced, otherwise we would have been without a house on the Friday 18th. The exchange and completion of contracts happening 5 minutes before the banks closed on the Friday made me feel like I was Wil-E-Coyote treading air just before a plunge into the abyss and uncertain homelessness over Christmas for our little nuclear family, but it happened, we got the house and just as C’s husband A said of moving house

“You’ll have 2 weeks of shit and then once you’ve moved it’ll all be forgotten”

I don’t like the 2 weeks of shit, and next time will get someone else to do it for me. So as I sit here, we have poor internet connection, i’m tethered to my iPhone which is on the kitchen floor next to the patio doors, getting boiled by the uncontrollable underfloor heating, we have no phone reception, so I conduct all my admin from a 4G soaked village hall car park 7 miles away, we have no telly and we have no landline. But we are warm, in the house, with the snow covering the hills outside. I haven’t been warm in a house for 16 years and it feels really nice. The kitchen was plumbed in for water on Christmas Eve, the floors are looking splendid, 3/4 covered in Engineered Oak, the kitchen floor is concrete. But we’re happy, apart from the WiFi!

When I look at the sunset from my back door I feel like I’m in Ibiza, but without the drugs, only because I haven’t found a dealer yet!