I want to be clear about something. We are not new here. We have lived in Buckinghamshire for over five years. We know our neighbours. We have a favourite pub. Our daughters have never known anything else. By any reasonable measure, we are locals.

And yet. I am still, in some fundamental way, adjusting.

I grew up shaped by London. The noise of it, the pace of it, the extraordinary ordinary fact of walking down a single street and encountering approximately forty different cultures, cuisines and conversations before you’ve reached the coffee shop. I didn’t know I was formed by all of that until I left it.

We moved out in early 2021 - Both girls arrived into a London life and were then promptly relocated to fields and fresh air before they were old enough to have an opinion about it. They have adapted magnificently. Better than me, if I’m honest. They are proper little country girls now - messy, feral in the best possible way, usually far more interested in foraging in the garden and rescuing whatever wildlife has crossed their path than in anything happening indoors. Rain or shine, they are outside. I’m not entirely sure they remember London. I’m not entirely sure they’d care.

What I miss

The diversity. I miss it more than I expected to and more than feels straightforward to articulate. Not just the people, but the food. The ability to want something specific and obscure for dinner and simply... go and get it. Japanese. Turkish. A very particular kind of ramen bowl. The city provides. The countryside does not.

I also miss the pop. As in, popping out. “I’ll just pop to the shops” was a sentence I said without thinking for the better part of thirty years. It is no longer available to me. The nearest convenience store is a twenty minute round trip. There is no nipping. There is no dashing. There is only committing. I still can’t wrap myself about the convenience of an Ocado shop, because I just really like “popping”.

The first time I ran out of something mid-recipe and registered that I could not simply go and get it, something shifted in me. I now have to plan meals like I’m preparing for a siege.

And then there’s the change. Or rather, the lack of it. I am not a creature of comfort. I like new things, new places, new experiences - the next thing, always. London feeds that instinct effortlessly. Something is always opening, changing, happening. Out here, the rhythm is steadier. The landscape doesn’t reinvent itself. The same places exist week after week, largely unchanged.

Getting our fix

My friend Lucy - fellow Londoner, fellow escapee, moved out at almost exactly the same time as us - and I have a phrase for it. Going into London is “getting our fix.” We say it without irony because it is completely accurate. You top up. Whatever that feeling is - the energy, the anonymity, the sense that everything is happening and you are adjacent to it - you absorb enough of it to last a few weeks, and then you come home.

I am fortunate enough to have a reason to go regularly. I kept my studio in Notting Hill. Partly for practical reasons because its still “out West”. Partly, if I’m being completely honest, because I wasn’t ready to fully let go, and I’m not sure I ever will be. It means I get my fix on a schedule. I step off the train at Marylebone and something in me recalibrates. I spend the day in the big smoke, I see my team, I see my clients, I walk streets that still feel like mine in some way. And then I come back to the fields and the fresh air and the twenty minute round trip for a pint of milk, and it all feels entirely right again.

Five years in and I’ve stopped trying to choose. The city fills something up. The countryside lets it settle. I’m not sure I could function properly on either one alone.

What I wouldn't trade

What I didn’t expect was that without the constant churn of new things, my overworked, perpetually busy mind has had to slow down. And in that slowing, something else has happened. The places we return to week in, week out, be it the pub, the farm shop, the same walk on a Sunday, have quietly become an extension of home. You get to know the people who work there. They get to know you. That familiarity, which I once would have mistaken for stagnation, or truth be told - even annoyance, turns out to feel remarkably like belonging.

The air helps too. It still surprises me, the quality of it, stepping outside in the morning into something that simply doesn’t taste of anything at all. Just an hour outside of London, and yet it feels like another world entirely. Nothing beats the drive home; the moment I hit the green spaces, down goes the window and in goes a great big lungful of it!

And the children. Watching our girls move through childhood with space - actual, physical, run-until-you-can’t-breathe space - is one of those things I couldn’t have properly valued until I saw it. They roam. They get muddy. They know the names of things we have never taught them. Life at their pace, in their scale, feels right in a way I didn’t know to want for them.

Life slows down outside of town. Coming from someone who hasn’t sat still in forty years, I cannot believe I’m about to say this - but I think that might be the point.

My Local Black Book

Marlow, High Wycombe, Fingest, Henley-on-Thames & the villages in between…...