I grew up in the Lake District, in Northern England, and have gradually been migrating south ever since, but the jump from the hilly surroundings of Derbyshire to the fens has been the biggest change I’ve made in one leap. In Cambridgeshire the flatness of the landscape is matched only by the flatness of the beer, and having been spoilt by the quality of ales available in the pubs of Derby this was a major shock.
My reason for moving was to be with my newly found soul mate Alex. Alex is a born and bred fen lass, and a fellow chef. She already had a thriving catering business around Cambridge, and I had only just set myself up as a private chef in Derbyshire, having spent thirty years of my working life in banking, so moving south made sense in terms of maintaining an income. Also the opportunities for private chef work in Cambridge far exceed those in Derby, so it wasn’t just a case of tossing a coin and me losing, as I like to pretend it was.
When we first got together I was commuting up and down the A1, visiting when I could, and Alex was living in a rented room in the house of The Witch, along with a number of other temporary residents who were at in-between stages of their lives, flitting in and out of the house like migrating birds, landing there for a week or a month to refuel, take stock, then move on.
I’m afraid I didn’t last very long – The Witch was too much for me, along with the stress of the whole situation, and after a big argument over Christmas, during which The Witch locked herself in her bedroom and phoned her special constable son claiming I was intimidating her, because she’d stormed in and demanded we clean down the cooker while we were in the middle of our meal and I’d dared to say we’ll do it later, I said to Alex we’ve got to get out of this place. By mid-January we had found ourselves our first home together, a two bedroom rental in Little Fenton, the coldest house I’ve ever lived in (although not as cold as I remember my Granddad’s ground floor flat with the wet bedclothes), and completely inadequate for running one chef business from, let alone two.
Alex found a kitchen in a village hall some twenty minutes away, but she couldn’t store her equipment there, which meant shuttling ingredients, crockery and everything else needed for a catering business back and forwards just about every day. She did it for over a year, but this wasn’t sustainable, and the strain was telling on both of us, most of all on Alex.
The problem was that our previous partners were still living in the houses we had left, and negotiations in respect of the houses being sold were not going to be resolved quickly. Until we had the capital, we couldn’t buy a house of our own. We needed to move on and move in, but we were well and truly stuck.
We had established the limited amount of mortgage we could obtain (and I can tell you, it’s not huge when you’re a self-employed chef, even when doubled up), and even seen a house we liked, for a price that we could theoretically afford in an ideal world, but the figures just didn’t stack up until we had that extra capital.
One night I woke up suddenly at three am, shook the icicles out of my dressing gown, went downstairs, grabbed a pen and paper and started scribbling figures.
“What are you doing?” asked a sleepy Alex coming downstairs at about three thirty, having realised I wasn’t snoring beside her.
“If we can borrow fifty thousand we can buy that house,” I said. “We would have to cash in everything, all our savings, shares, everything we have between us, but with fifty thousand extra we could do it.”
Now up in Derby I was not known for my risk taking. I wasn’t known for my ingenuity, nor for being particularly capable, or practical. To be honest I was a bit of a plodder. But now the way I approach life has changed, my self-belief and confidence in my own ability has changed, and it’s all to do with meeting Alex. Together I feel we can do anything. Any difficulty, and situation, just bring it on and we will meet it head on and beat it. Cash in everything and borrow fifty thousand? Not a problem. Why? Because that’s the way Alex faces life. She won’t let anything beat her, and she’s dragged me kicking and screaming into the real world.
First thing the next morning Alex phoned her brother Ronnie, asked him to lend fifty thousand pounds to her and some Northern bloke he had briefly met twice, and he said yes straight away. We were off.