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No trains or planes, no ambulances, no road-drills – nothing. It was a far cry from my old flat in central Bristol where the constant background hum of the city had been something I had taken for granted for far too long. Undoubtedly a townie born and bred, this would be my first attempt at living in the country. It would also be the first ever house I had lived in where I would be able to lie in bed and listen to the sounds of the dawn chorus. How exciting would that be?!
My hypnotic trance of imagining how wonderful it would be to listen to blackcaps before breakfast was suddenly broken by the sight and sound of another van outside trying its best to squeeze past my hurriedly parked car on the pavement. It was only then that I realised in our rush to open up for the removals guys that we had partially blocked the entrance to next door’s drive, and the owners of the other half of our semi. Not a good start. Dashing out to both apologise profusely and greet in one fell swoop, I offered the hand of friendship to my new neighbour, a wiry chap in his late forties called Andy, for whom an apology was deemed totally unnecessary and who seemed delighted that the other half of his property would finally be occupied. With big, bucket hands the texture of sandpaper, Andy was patently not someone who whiled away his professional life shuffling papers behind a desk; this was a man with a van, a man with technical ability and therefore someone worth cultivating a friendship with!
Despite being someone who crops up on telly on a regular basis to talk about everything from bumblebees to basking sharks, I’m often genuinely surprised when people recognise me. I suppose it’s because I forget that people will make the connection between the similarity of the chap appearing on the goggle-box and the person in the flesh. And while it’s very rarely an unpleasant experience when people want to meet you purely because you make regular appearances in the corner of their sitting rooms, it is a feeling, that unless you’re Paul McCartney or David Beckham, you never really get used to. So adopting my usual tactic of quickly changing the subject from his opening gambit of ‘I saw you on the telly last week’, I was quickly able to find out that not only was Andy a married man with three kids but also jointly ran a small plumbing business – handy indeed!
Apparently our arrival had been the talk of the street for the last couple of weeks, and whether this was down to my minor celebrity status or because anyone moving into a cul-de-sac in a small rural village would get the same level of scrutiny, I wasn’t sure. After pleasantries were exchanged, and as Andy patently seemed aware of my wildlife pedigree, he immediately implored me to come and see his garden, with which we shared a boundary for some 15 yards, so he could show me the array of feeders he had installed at various locations. Being a practical fellow, he had built a couple of lovely bespoke wooden feeding tables, rather than choosing the Dilger Way, which is usually to part with the cash at an inflated price instead.
It being a cold, wintery day, the local bird community was indeed piling in to his refuelling stations, and even without my trusty binoculars, in the matter of just a couple of minutes I was able to point out the usual cast of characters including great tit, blue tit, chaffinch, robin and dunnock. What I didn’t expect, though, was to see the tell-tale flashing white outer tail feathers of an altogether more unusual garden bird coming down to Andy’s offerings.
‘Reed bunting!’ I suddenly blurted out like a Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer, crudely cutting right across the middle of an entirely different discussion about the impressive amount of building work Andy had done to their house. To be fair, Andy also genuinely seemed thrilled by this find, declaring that he had never seen one before, and for me, back once again on the more comfortable subject of garden bird ecology rather than the intricacies of building regulations, I was able to give Andy a brief, impromptu lecture on the life history of the reed bunting.
Seemingly interested in my intricate knowledge of the bird’s ecology, and warming to the theme, Andy pointed out where they fed the local fox and then showed me another wildlife feature in their garden, which up until that point I hadn’t even noticed. Nestling behind an ugly leylandii and no more than two yards from our communal fence I was delighted to be shown a pond that Andy’s wife Lorraine, who apparently adores frogs, had cajoled her husband into digging back in 2007. Despite the feature looking like it needed a clear-out, as I could barely see any standing water for plants, Andy informed me, with immense pride, that both he and Lorraine regularly came down with a cuppa to watch both frogs and newts surfacing for a gulp of air before disappearing back down below to carry on with their aquatic shenanigans.
The reason for my delight at this news was twofold. Firstly it was wonderful that we had neighbours who were singing from the same song-sheet as us, in being keen to embrace the wildlife coming into their garden, rather than doing their level best to shut it out in favour of a sterile and – in my opinion – utterly soulless garden. Secondly, enticing frogs and newts into both our garden and the pond I would be creating later would surely be much easier if they only needed to travel a matter of a few yards across herbaceous border, rather than risk the perilous journey across acres of concrete and decking under the watchful eye of any number of predators.
Thanking Andy for the impromptu tour, and having had my offer of a glass of wine over the next couple of weeks accepted, I took my leave with the perfectly reasonable excuse that I had a house to unpack and shouldn’t be giving Christina the impression that I was purposefully shirking my box-emptying duties. I barely had one foot through the door when I heard a small voice behind me. Marjory, as her name turned out, was our neighbour on the other side, and the lady with whom we had joint custody over the drive, although we didn’t have a wall in common. Looking, to be honest, a touch unwell, Marjory must have been in her early fifties and was married to a chap called Dennis, who wouldn’t be popping out to say hello as he was unwell and vulnerable to the sharp winter chill. It turned out that Marjory was also fighting her own battles with illness and was not keen to linger too long on the doorstep either, so she offered a brief but warm welcome to the street.
I prepared to attack the boxes with gusto, but only after one vital task was carried out. I had to get my priorities right and so immediately put up a couple of my feeders from my old flat into our new garden – we wanted reed buntings too!
As the day-to-day living essentials slowly began to be unpacked we at last began to make some progress in turning the house from a warehouse into some kind of home. Concentrating on the kitchen, so that we would at least be able to eat, and the bedroom, so that we could at least sleep, pots were placed in bare cupboards, cutlery located in empty drawers and the bed reassembled before being made. Pausing only for a cup of tea, poured out of the newly located teapot, our conversation was cut short by a knock at the door.
Having arrived back from work, Andy’s wife Lorraine’s curiosity had obviously got the better of her as she decided that meeting her new neighbours was something that couldn’t wait until the following day. Talking in a thick Bristolian accent, which I have come to adore since moving to this part of the world, this blonde, super-slim mum of three was someone for whom talking was obviously a passion – what a chatterbox! In no time at all, we were all getting on like we had been friends for years, and very kindly she had no qualms in instantly offering her husband’s services on hearing our most pressing domestic concern as to why we had no water coming out of any of the hot taps.
With hungry adolescents to feed next door, Lorraine bid us goodnight, and barely had we closed the door when the third neighbour of the day came knocking, also keen to welcome us to the street. Pausing only briefly to contemplate the difference between our warm reception in Chew Stoke and the decidedly chillier welcome I had received on purchasing my previous flat in Bristol, when it had taken weeks for my neighbours just to acknowledge my existence, I invited Stuart in to find a seat amongst the boxes. Stuart, it has to be said, was someone I already knew well, as until recently he had been a TV editor. Hailing from the West Midlands town of Stafford, I had always felt a kindred spirit with Stuart’s Black Country roots and especially after we had discovered during one previous discourse on football that we must have coincidentally been at a number of the same Wolverhampton Wanderers matches as kids.
Whilst helping us drain the rest of a bottle of champagne we had brought with us to celebrate the move, Stu regaled us with all the gossip about those neighbours we hadn’t