In our family we do not have the Book of Kells, but we do have a Book of Kelso. It’s a notebook dedicated to the study of the Scottish border town on the banks of the River Tweed. Why? The answer can be traced back to the moment we realised that our children could save a six-figure sum on university tuition fees if we lived in Scotland.
Moving north of the border amounts to quite a radical remedy to the problem posed by the spiralling cost of higher education, particularly since we are increasingly unconvinced that a degree is the key to a rosy future for millennials.
But the idea of relocating 370 miles north has taken root as ineradicably as a thistle in a pony paddock. This is not about returning to the Glens of our kin. My wife and I have Celtic blood, but it’s Irish not Scottish. It is, however, certainly a romantic notion, fuelled by an excess of Sir Walter Scott in my teens and, more recently, the musings of Tory MP Rory Stewart.
Stewart’s terrific book The Marches is a long love letter to “the Middleland”. Some of his stories about the Reivers – the lawless border bandits who turned rustling into an industry – I could recognise from visits to a farming friend on the banks of the Solway. But I was almost ashamed by my want of appreciation of Hadrian’s Wall. Not its significance as the boundary of the Roman Empire; instead, what it meant as a feat of engineering. It took more workers to construct than the Pyramids. Who knew?
Of course, the odds favour inertia. Could I really spend four nights a week in London, and do a weekly commute back to Berwick by train? What about the cold, the long winter nights, the midges? Would my children be bullied at school as Anglo-colonialists, made to swear allegiance to Nicola Sturgeon in Scots Gaelic?
Yet my misgivings haven’t quite vanquished my inner Dr Pangloss. Property websites conjure up images of ancient, thick-walled farmhouses, with enough acreage for the good life. Many seem to have six or seven bedrooms. Too many for many modern families, ideal for us.
Then there are the horses. The Borders rejoice in celebrations of equestrianism: events like the Common Riding, where hundreds of riders take to the towns. Down south, the average rural A-road is witnessing a three per cent increase in road traffic every year. A hack down a quiet country lane is a fading memory in many parts of the south east of England.
And that sense of our crowded island may one day be the clincher. It might not happen until my commute is courtesy of a driverless car, but I can still dream. As Sir Walter Scott reminds us in Rob Roy: “To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.”
When I met my wife there was already a ‘‘significant other’’ in her life. He was called Gateau: a cat imported from Singapore, where Jo had been working. Perhaps there had been a keeper who had been vicious to him during his six months in quarantine, for Gateau was a man-hating ginger tom.
When I returned to our flat after work, he would mount a feline ambush, tearing at my ankles. And Gateau was not easily repulsed. He was charming in the way that William “the Refrigerator” Perry was cute when he stood as defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears in the 1980s. Not so much a ball of fluff, as a mass of muscle, claw and brawn.
I am not, then, well disposed to cats. All my prejudices have been confirmed since we adopted a pair this summer. They are too well fed to do anything as useful as ridding us of our barnyard rats. They prefer prey lacking the heft to fight back: field mice, voles and baby rabbits.
One estimate suggests that Britain’s domestic cats eat 275 million other animals each year. There are no official figures to show what proportion of that multitude includes songbirds, but I am not alone in suspecting it to be substantial. One of the joys of planting hedges – hawthorn, beech and blackthorn – has been to watch how robins, tits and wrens use them as wildlife corridors.
This winter, I fear, those hedges will no longer be havens, but killing zones.
Moggies, of course, find moving home difficult. Och aye.
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