Happiness is standing still …

Looking up at the canopy of my wood. Yes. MY. WOOD.

In my wood. Yes, you heard that correctly. My. Wood. Those of you who read this blog will know that Ive recently  moved house. Despite the fact that our previous house was perfectly good, I’ve never really felt ‘at home’ there. It was a place I lived rather than my ‘home’.

It had a huge garden that was roughly 120′ long and was just too much work to not only keep down, but to actually get into a decent condition to start with. Which didn’t help my outlook.

I then spent roughly six months of my life trapped in that house due to crippling pain and drug induced sleep caused by a trapped kidney pain, as well as damage caused by attempts to get rid of the stone. Needless to say, when someone posted a letter through our door saying that they were looking to buy in the area and could pay cash, I was more than happy to start looking at properties.

They say that the average person in Britain spends less time buying a house than they do a car. Probably because houses have spirits. You’ll know what I mean by that, they seem to absorb the nature of the people that lived in them previously. You can walk into a strange house and immediately think ‘Nope’, just as you can walk into a house and think ‘Fuck yeah.’ You’ll only have been there for a minute at most and yet you’ll make an almost instinctive decision to buy. There and then, you know that you want the house.

This house was a most definite ‘fuck yeah’. It had a library for me (big tick), an office for me and Karen (bigger tick), and a utility room (even bigger tick). It also had a nice sized lawned garden that led down a bank to a small valley with a stream running through it and, more importantly, a protected wood running all the way from the top of the valley down to a road.

This means that I have a wood in my garden, as the wood runs right through our boundary. I own a wood. It’s a small wood and there are many woods like it, but this is MY wood. I’ve always wanted to own a wood. Ever since I was an Elven Ranger racing through the woods to defeat the Orc invasion, or a member of the British army fighting the German/Russian hordes, I’ve loved running through, and playing in woods. I’ve also loved just sitting and strolling through woods, especially now as people look really oddly at me as I run past them screaming Elvish war cries (their problem, not mine).

Now, I can wander down to the end of my lawn, unlatch the gate, and enter my own sylvan kingdom, and that dear reader, makes me truly happy.