The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

It feels like a million years ago, but it’s less than 2 years ago.

It was taken around Christmas 2020 …

We were living in England and we’d recently bought that house.

We knew we weren’t going to be in it for long as I’d accepted the job at Colenso … but we wanted to enjoy it as much as we could while we were there.

And so we did.

But the snow added a new dimension to the experience.

It came down a lot over a few short days and so for the first time since I had left the UK 25 years earlier, I was in a place that had enough snow to mess about with. For Otis, it was the first time he could … the first time he properly experienced snow … and after he’d accepted it was bloody cold, it was a bloody challenge to get him back indoors.

Oh the fun.

Snowball fights.
Building snowmen.
Slipping and sliding.

It was amazing.

All topped off by us getting into our giant hot tub in the garden to get warm, while it snowed around us … which was a bizarre – yet awesome – feeling.

And while that house is pretty much isolated in the countryside, so the small roads were all ice rinks, something about that week made the whole thing even more special for us.

A chance to connect to that house. To build a memory with that house. To be a family home.

And yet, when I saw that photo it seemed like another life.

A world away from the one we live in now.

Yet it’s still our home.
We may well one day return to it.
And we still utterly love it and its garden.

Lots of people talk about their ‘forever home’. I get it …

But the reality is while a place you grow roots in, is very important … the thing we forget is we have to do the work. It doesn’t happen by itself. Those 4 walls require the interaction of the people in it to build something worth remembering it for.