Regrettable adventures

One of the side effects in the UK of Covid, or perhaps more specifically the various lockdowns is that it left many people with a deep desire to get away.

- ANDREW ANTHONY

I don’t mean on holiday – although there was indeed that yearning – but permanently from where they were. One survey last year, for example, showed that more than 50% of Londoners wanted to move to the countryside.

And many did. But for those who didn’t go rural, most just wanted to change their surroundings, having spent too long stuck in the same place. My wife and I fell into both categories, and after searching around most of southern England, we recently ended up moving less than a mile from where we had been. It’s a temporary berth – a street away from where the infamous Isis terrorist and killer “Jihadi John” grew up – before moving, in about nine months, to our new home a few hundred meters further away.