It’s 5.30am on the morning of 7th Jan. I took this pic last night but was too tired to sort out something to say so it was going to wait until morning. BUT I’ve been awake since 3.30am, mind buzzing with the inevitable ‘OMG WHAT have we done?’ So, I decided to give in to sleeplessness and come and write my stuff and post now!

So, what a day. What a long, hard, gruelling day but most of our ‘stuff’ is now here and so we can start to work through the muddle and detritus of our world and start to rebuild what we picked apart last year.

We have discovered more difficulties since yesterday, like needing to put your hand down into the icy cistern water to manually lift the lever that flushes the loo…because it’s the only way you can! We’ve also got about 1/5 of our stuff that’s in a pallet somewhere in Pickfords system and lost!!! We were expecting it all to be delivered today but for whatever reason, some of it has been moved to a different storage depot and mislaid. They’ve also broken our bed so we’re still on the floor tonight. Perhaps that’s contributing to the sleeplessness. We’ve found a key today to the studio and discovered it’s still fully-furnished with horrid ancient furniture that we’re now going to have to dispose of before we set our office up. Ugh! Probably topping the lot though is the fact that we’ve found such copious quantities of mouse and rat poison there must be a big problem here, though I’ve not actually seen any evidence of either other than the poison. I’m terrified Rosie or Archie will come across some poison that I’ve not spotted and think it’s a good snack. Yikes – something else to worry about, along with whether or not there are any holes in the fence where my precious babies could get onto the road…….groan.

Strangely, I miss the little cottage so much it’s bothering me. It’s not so much the stone and mortar although if I’d been downstairs there at this time of the morning, the fire would still be warming up the room and I’m sitting here shivering tonight. I do miss that but I miss the neighbours more.

What we could not have ever realised before we moved to the cottage was the wonderful community we’d accidentally landed in. We’ve made more friends there than we could have imagined and, although they’re only a mile or so away, it’s strange and disconcerting to feel that we can’t hop over the fence and bang on Pete and Erica’s door for a chat or a cup of sugar. We can’t hang over our wall and chat with the walkers as they go past because we’re now back in a ‘proper’ road with traffic! The days of us wandering up to Iain and Becky’s for a drink then staggering the ten paces or so back to our own place are gone too.

In stark contrast, our neighbours here haven’t even been seen so far. When I think back to the day we arrived at the little cottage and the welcoming committee were outside in the road, smiling and generally being really friendly, this couldn’t be more different.

Now though, those folks are our friends and I can see us spending time over there again and just watching the world go by, chewing the fat with them all. I’m hoping too that they won’t be strangers here.

Today we’ve had the help of two heroic friends (Alan and Christine), who’ve worked like dogs to help us to settle in here. Alan has been helping DM lug furniture and boxes around and Christine, a new friend, turned up unannounced with a bucket full of cleaning equipment, got on her pinny, rolled up her sleeves and set-to cleaning and scrubbing the kitchen. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to both of you.

Just by way of demonstrating the way that we’ve become a part of that little community so quickly, this heart-shaped walnut was given to us by our neighbours’ (from the cottage) teenage daughter, who cracked it, saw the heart and then decided she couldn’t bear to eat the nut inside. She gave it to us because she knows ‘we photograph strange things’. I can’t imagine that any of our neighbours back in Sandhurst would have even known we were keen photographers, let alone thought that was a reason for giving us a half-cracked walnut.

For me this symbolises the ‘rightness’ of this move. People here take time to get to know you a bit. I’m sitting here in chaos but I know there is something beating in our Cornish community and it’s called a heart!

Last year, we were preparing for a visit from one of our global community of pbase friends, the completely lovely Lara.