And so this is Christmas, and if my plans for next year work out it will be the last I spend in my Somerset cottage. Leaving feels bittersweet, especially now.
There is a romance to rural winters I’ll miss, one conjured through the twinkling lights of homes dotted across black fields, through cosy pubs and thatched cottages with low beams, and through snuggling together beside open fires with lazy flames.
Winter in the countryside feels like the season we’ve been preparing for all year, like mice laying nests to hibernate. You can’t replicate that romance in a modern centrally heated flat.
We might not have Selfridges’ Santa’s grotto but there are other pleasures: tractor runs in which farm machines covered in fairy lights career dangerously down tight village lanes; Santa’s sledge driving over fields and past children looking out of cottage windows; crammed toasty pubs and crisp Boxing Day dog walks in the fields.
My home looks especially chocolate boxy at this time of year, like what you’d get if you asked an American to draw an English Christmas, so basically how the cottage in the film The Holiday looks. With its inglenook fireplace and low timber beams, it looks as though elves have got drunk on eggnog and designed a house for Mrs Claus.
Still, despite the dreaminess of a country Christmas, it’s painfully impractical too. Country Christmas might sound like a rom-com but the reality is harder than it looks. And after suffering through three, I am ready to give it up.
First there is the weather. I know, there is weather in the city, but it doesn’t dominate your life in the way country weather does. City types picture rural Christmas as a flutter of snowflakes on a thatched roof. But in the countryside we are constantly petrified that temperatures will drop below freezing and make the old pipes burst or the boiler break — both of which have happened to me — and that no one will be able to fix them for weeks.
If the air freezes overnight the wet roads become a lethal assault course of black ice that delivery drivers refuse to traverse, and I’ll be too scared to drive.
If there’s not snow, we get floods, so the drains overflow and the garden becomes a slush heap of mud. No wonder Ellen DeGeneres reportedly fled the Cotswolds winter to run back to LA.
• Ellen and Portia fleeing the Cotswolds? My heart goes out to them. Really
Inside conditions can be equally bleak. Guests rock up expecting an amalgamation of Christmas songs: chestnuts roasting on an open fire, a shining star on the highest bough, a partridge in a pear tree. They are instead stunned to find the reality is cold and isolating.
My first Christmas in the cottage, when the boiler broke, was especially hardcore. I had one open fire and hadn’t yet invested in thick curtains, a wardrobe of thermals and hot water bottles. So I would sit, hands shaking, trying to light the fire, as friends on the phone in their city flats trilled about how romantic a country Christmas must be.
The isolation of country living is so much starker in winter. When I lived in London I’d spend Christmas nights staggering around pubs drinking mulled wine with friends, going to Christmas parties and Winter Wonderland, taking a group to drag panto or the midnight service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Now, once I install myself in the cottage for Christmas, I’ll be stuck in it until new year, going crazy with rural fomo at the thought that life is happening elsewhere.
After 4pm, when the light vanishes, you’d better like Victoriana because it’s like a Little Women convention around here. I spend endless evenings trying to keep entertained with olde time activities such as sewing, knitting and crocheting (all of which I am bad at).
• Read expert advice on property, interiors and home improvement
In the countryside even going to the pub is a palaver. It’s a Christmas miracle if you can get a cab. The other options are to drive and stay sober or attempt the lethal one-hour walk back along pitch-black lanes using your iPhone as a torch.
I miss glamorous Christmases when I would dress up — I wore posh outfits for yuletide in the city. In the countryside, why bother? Have you tried walking through a forest in heels or getting mud out of sequins? I’ll probably stay in whichever pyjamas are warmest.
It feels pointless bothering with decorations, as I realised the first year when I wrangled Christmas lights onto the roof, doubling my electricity bill, only to grasp that because no one drives down our lane, only the dog and I would see them.
My attempts at rustic Christmas decorations for inside were equally disastrous. Having gone to the forest to collect holly, berries and ivy to decorate the fireplace, I came out in a welt-like rash.
It’s lonely in the countryside during the holidays but having friends to visit is another source of stress. No amount of cleaning makes the place look acceptable for guests. There are cobwebs so inaccessible they’ve been there since my 18th-century cottage was built. One visiting friend was so freezing she spent evenings sitting in her car to keep warm.
You have to be organised about country Christmas, which I am not. By the time I remembered to order the Christmas meat from the butcher, all the good cuts had gone. If I run out of cranberry jelly on Christmas Day I can’t just pop across the road to the shop, like I did in Dalston. Things city folk take for granted — baklava, decent coffee, Marcona almonds — are wildly exotic delicacies impossible to source, not that I’d be able to buy them anyway as I have spent all my money on DIY.
• I’m sleeping in a caravan so I can put my cottage on Airbnb
So I suppose these are the reasons that I am a boomerang buyer, one of many who got high on #cottagecore and purchased my dream home during Covid, only to now be slinking back to London, taking back all the bad stuff I said about city life.
Estate agents are calling it “the five-year property itch” as lockdown rural buyers try to sell up — wish us luck! Analysis for The Sunday Times conducted by Hamptons estate agency this year found 9 per cent more rural homes for sale in March 2025 than in March 2024. Research also found a disproportionately large proportion of those sellers bought their homes in 2021 (like me).
Of course, having got carried away with the good life, I now have a massive chocolate labrador, tons of chintz and endless David Austin roses to move with (yes, I’ll leave some for the new owners). I’ll have to pay thousands in stamp duty again. But it’ll be worth it to be back in London: for the culture injection, the lights, the chance to get laid (stuck among the fields there’ll be no chance of a random Christmas kiss for me).
Still, I don’t regret moving to the country. It was an adventure.
• It’s true, we do have more sex in the shires
And when I’m ensconced in city life I will miss these creamy Somerset fields, the stillness that resets my nervous system, the luxury of a garden and getting away with not brushing my hair for days. I’ll also miss the way rural life calms me on long lazy evenings spent cooking rice pudding on the wood-burning stove, how it makes me appreciate small moments of beauty like seeing the roses burst in winter, the smell of wood smoke or sitting in bed with the dog listening to the birds chirp and the wind cracking the trees. Mostly I will miss the wonderful friends I have made here.
In a funny way I’ll miss the challenges of rural life. It has been surprisingly fun to learn how to grout and to unblock a septic tank with drain rods. I’ve learnt to make a hillbilly hot tub (a garden bath heated by a fire) and to brew my own cider from the apple tree (even if it tasted like paint stripper). As always with a house, I’m leaving just as things are improving — the boiler is fixed, the wood-burners are installed and, miraculously, Uber Eats has started delivering (even if it takes an hour).
Still, three years of country Christmases are enough for me. And I bet if they made a sequel to The Holiday, Jude Law and Cameron Diaz would have moved back to LA.