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.<\/p>\n
There is a romance to rural winters I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
Winter in the countryside feels like the season we\u2019ve been preparing for all year, like mice laying nests to hibernate. You can\u2019t replicate that romance in a modern centrally heated flat.<\/p>\n
We might not have Selfridges\u2019 Santa\u2019s grotto but there are other pleasures: tractor runs in which farm machines covered in fairy lights career dangerously down tight village lanes; Santa\u2019s sledge driving over fields and past children looking out of cottage windows; crammed toasty pubs and crisp Boxing Day dog walks in the fields.<\/p>\n
My home looks especially chocolate boxy at this time of year, like what you\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
Still, despite the dreaminess of a country Christmas, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
First there is the weather. I know, there is weather in the city, but it doesn\u2019t 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 \u2014 both of which have happened to me \u2014 and that no one will be able to fix them for weeks.<\/p>\n
If the air freezes overnight the wet roads become a lethal assault course of black ice that delivery drivers refuse to traverse, and I\u2019ll be too scared to drive.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Ellen and Portia fleeing the Cotswolds? My heart goes out to them. Really<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n My first Christmas in the cottage, when the boiler broke, was especially hardcore. I had one open fire and hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The isolation of country living is so much starker in winter. When I lived in London I\u2019d 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\u2019s Cathedral. Now, once I install myself in the cottage for Christmas, I\u2019ll be stuck in it until new year, going crazy with rural fomo at the thought that life is happening elsewhere.<\/p>\n After 4pm, when the light vanishes, you\u2019d better like Victoriana because it\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n \u2022 Read expert advice on property, interiors and home improvement<\/a><\/p>\n In the countryside even going to the pub is a palaver. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n I miss glamorous Christmases when I would dress up \u2014 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\u2019ll probably stay in whichever pyjamas are warmest.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t just pop across the road to the shop, like I did in Dalston. Things city folk take for granted \u2014 baklava, decent coffee, Marcona almonds \u2014 are wildly exotic delicacies impossible to source, not that I\u2019d be able to buy them anyway as I have spent all my money on DIY.<\/p>\n \u2022 I\u2019m sleeping in a caravan so I can put my cottage on Airbnb<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Estate agents are calling it \u201cthe five-year property itch\u201d as lockdown rural buyers try to sell up \u2014 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<\/a> than in March 2024. Research also found a disproportionately large proportion of those sellers bought their homes in 2021 (like me).<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll leave some for the new owners). I\u2019ll have to pay thousands in stamp duty again. But it\u2019ll be worth it to be back in London: for the culture injection, the lights, the chance to get laid (stuck among the fields there\u2019ll be no chance of a random Christmas kiss for me).<\/p>\n Still, I don\u2019t regret moving to the country. It was an adventure.<\/p>\n