We’re getting quite nicely settled into our new home now, though not without a few teething troubles. It was a week before we found time to unpack (or at least start to unpack - we’ve still got lots of stuff in boxes, but we no longer have to clamber over them every time we want to switch on the TV), so for a while we had to dig through piles of boxes every time we wanted something we hadn’t used yet, which was inconvenient but not incapacitating, until Jess switched on the hob.

Due to some dodgy wiring, this resulted in an electrical short, and all the lights went off. I’ve been in similar situations before, and it’s never been a major problem - I’ve simply felt my way to the fusebox and flicked the switch back to the ‘On’ position. On this occasion, that procedure was made more difficult due to several factors. Firstly, I had yet to work out where the fusebox is. Since there’s exactly no artificial lighting in the vicinity of our house, and the sun had set several hours earlier, it was about as dark as it’s possible to be without gouging your eyes out with a fork. What I needed, therefore, was a torch. I have a torch, but of course I hadn’t unpacked it yet - that’s the second factor - and therefore had absolutely no hope of finding it without… well, a torch. My only option was to go next door for help.

Unfortunately - factor number three - the front door was locked, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put my keys. Unless I could find them… well, it didn’t bear thinking about, but it would probably involve Jess and I drawing straws, and then arguing in the dark about which was the short one.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but whatever it was, before I did it I needed to get Jess sitting down where she couldn’t bump into anything or cause any more trouble, so with difficulty I guided her through the maze of boxes to the living room and sat her down. Only then did it occur to me that the backlight of my mobile phone would act as a feeble makeshift torch, and with its assistance I eventually located my keys, unlocked the door, and got the neighbour to show me the fusebox. Thus disaster was averted in an uninteresting and anticlimactic manner, rendering the whole thing a fairly pointless story.

Then there was the Washing Machine Incident but Jess has already recorded that for posterity in her blog and I have no wish to replay the harrowing memory any more than necessary, so let’s not go into that again.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Google AdWords telling me that I “may be eligible for a refund of Irish VAT charged by Google Ireland Ltd", and that I should go and update my details to find out. Well, to the best of my knowledge I don’t have any direct dealings with Google Ireland, so I presumed that this applied only to those instances of my ads that appear on google.ie, which must be an insignificant percentage, and therefore the amount of VAT I’d be eligible to be refunded would probably be about 7p. This being the case, I didn’t bother going to update my details for ages, but eventually I got round to it and thought no more about it. So I was quite surprised on Tuesday when they sent me another email telling me that they were going to refund me £1428.67.

As surprises go, that was quite a good one.

Anyway, I’m really here to tell you about our new house, and what a nice house it is! It’s another olde worlde cottage, albeit with less mod cons than the last one - it doesn’t even have central heating, though the night storage heaters it has instead seem to perform the job perfectly well. Everyone keeps telling us they’re horribly expensive to run, but I’m trying not to think about that - though I did just do a quick google, and it appears they may have been exaggerating anyway.

But what I like most about our cottage is the setting, which is a tiny little… well, it’s a tiny little something. It probably isn’t big enough to call a village. I think ‘hamlet’ might be the mot juste. It’s a tiny little hamlet, with very few houses and nothing else. Having learnt that the woman who owns our house also owns several of the others, I said to one of the neighbours: “She seems to own half the village,” only to be told that, with only one or two exceptions, she owns the whole village. Or possibly hamlet.

Last year for Jess’s birthday I bought her a telescope, which was a great present in theory, but we quickly discovered that the particular arrangement of hills and valleys in the vicinity of Rossendale conspire to ensure an overcast sky every single night, so she was never able to get much use out of it. Here, though, the land is flat for miles around, giving the clouds no excuse to pile up, and our cottage is so far from the nearest street light that the sky looks quite brilliant at night. So now, when we take the telescope out into the large garden we share with our neighbours, where the chickens and apple trees roam free, I think we’re going to have considerably more success.

It’s very peaceful here. Our biggest concern was that it’s in the middle of nowhere, and we might find ourselves driving several hours a day to fill up a bucket from the nearest well, but it turns out there are local shops we didn’t know about, and the journey to the university takes a mere 12 minutes, so really we’ve got nothing to complain about at all. I think we’re going to be happy here.

Now we just have to see if we can persuade the landlady to let us have a dog.

It’s been a busy week.

We’re currently in the process of moving to York. Yesterday we transported all of our worldly possessions from our old cottage to our new one - of which more shortly - and then returned to Lancashire, as there are a few last bits of tidying up we need to do today. Of course there are no longer any home comforts - such as, say, a bed - in our previous residence, so we’ve spent the night at Jess’s mum’s house instead. Today we’ll be going back to York, arranging our belongings in a more organised manner than ‘a big pile in the living room’, and spending our first night in our new home.

Anyway, all the busyness of preparing for the move has meant I’ve got very little work done all week, so I’m going to have another busy week catching up. Next weekend I’m hoping I’ll be able to sit down and relax for five minutes (because obviously I’m not doing that now).

…And that’s as far as I got with writing this on Sunday morning. Then we moved to the new house, and our broadband didn’t start working until today - or rather, the line was working, but I’d done something stupid that meant the workingness ceased somewhere between the telephone socket and the router - so only now can I resume where I left off.

So, yes, transporting our worldly etcs to the new cottage. Our accumulated belongings have grown sufficiently since the last move that this time we had to hire a van, which I was quite willing to drive to York, but for some reason no one else trusted me to do so without causing a major pile-up, so Jess’s stepdad was drafted in to replace me. I took him to the van hire place where they explained that the tank was full, and they’d fill it up again when we got back and charge me for whatever we’d used. That all seemed in order, so he started to drive the van away, only to observe the fuel gauge claiming the tank was one quarter empty.

He drove back and pointed this out.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the man. “The gauge is faulty, it’s definitely full.”

“I think perhaps we should put it on a pump, just to make sure,” said Jess’s stepdad, who knows a scam when he sees one.

“Oh, there’s no need for that, it’s definitely full.”

“Still, just to be sure, eh?”

“Er… well, um, okay then. Oh, silly me, I just remembered, I forgot to fill it up. What a dolt I am!”

We then raced to York, did the business with the estate agents, and unloaded the van as fast as our van unloading capabilities would allow. We had to have the van back by 4:30 or we’d have to pay for an extra day - and given the fact that the chap had already tried to con me once, I was particularly loathe to give him any more money than I had to - but by this point it wasn’t looking as though we were going to make it.

By the time those of us in my car - which goes considerably faster than the van and had overtaken it half an hour ago on the motorway - were ten minutes away from the van hire place at 4:15, any confidence we’d had that we were going to hit the deadline had faded. But a phone call to the van revealed that they’d taken a fiendish shortcut and were already there! Hurrah!

And so that was the end of that. I’ll tell you all about our new home next time, because I’m far too busy to write any more now.