One of my biggest regrets of the past three years is that I wasted so much time worrying. I was a worrier with a capital W. I worried about where we were going to live, what we were going to do for work and what school my daughter would eventually go to. I worried about all sorts of things but, mainly, I worried about the future.

I am a planner you see. I wish I wasn’t but I am. So there you go. This means that, although we lived in a pretty little cottage in a lovely village in Berkshire not far from London, I couldn’t relax. It was all so… temporary.

We rented our house and lived on a rolling short term tenancy contract. Buying a house was on our “To Do” list, not because we aspired to owning property particularly but because tenants in this country hardly have any rights or security and, after 6 years renting we’d had enough. We wanted to put down roots properly but knew the chances of affording anything bigger than a shoebox in that part of the UK was nigh on impossible. Continue reading »