The end of an era

Moving back to Leiston has meant selling our home in Norfolk, which we bought as a derelict farmstead in 1998. We won planning consent to convert the brick barn into our home, and the adjacent 17th century farmhouse into offices. It was here that our two children grew up and left home, where I started, ran and then sold a marketing company, and I where I wrote 19 books.

For the past few years, we’ve rented rooms out in the old farmhouse to small businesses and let the paddock across the road to a chap who breeds horses. We had enough land to justify owning a tractor, and my father-in-law kindly gave us a 1964 Fordson Super Dexta for which we bought a grass cutter and a trailer.

Yesterday, we completed the sale of Turnpike Farm some eight months after agreeing a price with a local entrepreneur who I’m sure will develop the site into something new and interesting. The process by which property is bought and sold is in my view in need of radical reform. There is no commitment until contracts are exchanged, and the whole process can take months, as it has in this case.

Now the tractor is at our daughter’s place in America and I no longer have offices to let, drains to rod or a large place to maintain. Our new home is nearing completion and should cost little to run and require little if any maintenance. Now I can focus properly on my future career as a non-fiction author.