Max Stafford's Kennel

Followers of this blog will be aware of my intention, formally announced last July to sell up and move back to Scotland. At that time I gave myself nine months to complete the mission. World events obviously had other plans…

Realistically, I still had work to do on the place when Lockdown kicked in and my nine months estimate wasn’t perhaps as realistic as first thought. Nevertheless, as a result of Lockdown I found myself on voluntary furlough for two months which allowed me to make great progress. I now have only three smallish material jobs to complete and I have plans for hopefully executing two of those shortly. In the meantime, life centres on getting stuff packed away to present an uncluttered appearance for any viewer.

This of course means that a lot of the personal stuff has gone into boxes now and the place is beginning to look a little sparse and impersonal. Other than the garden which I spend most of my time sat or busy in at the moment, the house has become a kind of half-way between the two worlds of the past and the future. Coupled with the way things currently are, it’s a strange kind of limbo I find myself in; stuck here but wanting to be somewhere else but not seeing an immediate end to the situation. Even though I’m not far from listing the property, I need to find a new place in Scotland to go to but with the Scottish Government exercising a gradual approach to the easing of lockdown it may be a little bit before I can actually go and scout my intended area of residence on the ground still.

Living alone of course means it’s entirely on my own plate and I’m just having to learn what and how to do it on my own as I go. This means things happen slowly and there’s only one head and set of resources to do the thinking but that’s where we are; nobody is actually forcing me to do this and the end makes the effort worthwhile. And there is still modelling to be done…