On the Market

We’ve only gone and done it again. In January, no one – including us – would have believed that we would actually get off our bottoms and get out there into the world, to travel again as a family of five. But without sounding too smug, it looks like we are almost there. We have, since January:

* resigned the job that brought in most of our household income
* got the house on the market
* SOLD the house
* sold almost everything small or non-essential in the house … hundreds of items on Ebay, at car boot sales and to friends
* gone public, when Joe resigned his job yesterday.

So now we can finally, excitedly, tell you about our plans. We intend to spend the next few years travelling, home educating, roaming the world with no intention of ‘coming back’. The initial plan is to buy a bog-off-big-bus and head towards India, totally overland, via a lot of places that we did not touch on our last trip. This will involve Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Turkey, Middle East, a couple of ‘Stans … and then, who knows? A good couple of years to reach Mumbai. A GOOD couple of years tasting new flavours (in Rowan’s case quite literally as she likes to lick new places) and opening our eyes to new vistas.

Of course this has all depended on selling the house, and selling it fast. Even in this gloomy/ downright depressing economic climate, this IS possible. We priced low, we made our unusual home look like the complete bargain that it is, and funnily enough people came. They looked, they saw, they offered. It CAN be that simple. Luckily, we have a very nice couple who want to buy our house and need to move fast, which suits us down to the ground. May 11th was D-Day for the country in finding out what kind of new government was about to be inflicted on them, but it was also the day we found out whether our buyer’s own sale was going through. It was a day of high emotions for Messrs Cameron and Clegg but probably even higher in the Pritchard household. When we finally got the call to say that all was going ahead, there was – it must be said – a modicum of jollity.

Then we had to get down to business, with something of a bump. We soon discovered that our buyer wants to complete on June 4th, which very handily coincides with when we are out of the country. Yes folks, we have booked a holiday. Not satisfied with roaming the world for the next couple of decades we decided back in November that what we REALLY needed was foreign holiday. OK so with hindsight this may have been a little misguided, but we have a bit of a track record of this type of thing. Last time we travelled, we bogged off to Venice just before departing. This time, it’s Sardinia – and with the buyer’s time frame now established – we will actually be abroad when we have to vacate our house. So the time we have left in which to clear all the decks is even shorter. And of course we plan to have a great big party to celebrate our leaving.

Suddenly we are faced with 16 rooms and 10 years of 5 peoples’ accumulation to purge, and just 17 days in which to do it. I feel energised, dead scared, at a loss as to where to start and deeply excited. Now we seem to have an endless passage of friends arriving and inventorising our home. I feel a bit like Bilbo just before his party. But we need to sell everything from salad forks to sofas, Christmas decs to cars and there is no time like the present. In fact, the only time is the present.

The kids are surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing, lethargic about doing anything constructive and just plain messy. That really doesn’t help at this point, but they do help – with their hopes and glee, their mad ideas and mayhem. They are the main reason we are embarking on this seeming foolishness: to blast them into a huge world of experience, to let them learn from the road and everyone they might meet, to love and laugh as we wake each morning to a new horizon. Let’s face it, it’s going to be a damned good laugh.