A world of pure (re)imagination

So I spent 30 years not doing something, and now I have. I have to pinch myself to tell if it's real.

I have been travelling down to the South West of England, particularly the coast of East Devon, since I was about 10 years old. First it was school holidays and summer breaks before Uni. Then numerous trips to see friends and relatives. A few years owning a "holiday" home in the area (before that became a crazy expensive thing).

More Airbnbs than you could imagine on holidays with our own kids, loving it when they were young, though they were less keen when they were teenagers. And then all of us back here together for New Year breaks, family ranging from 5 to 85.

Anyway, we just relocated here this summer. Permanently. A change of scene, lifestyle, setting and a different professional and personal focus.

It's early days. London, Cambridge and anywhere right of Stonehenge on a map seem a very long way away. But we're working through the options, the station-parking nightmare, and the sheer obscene cost of GWR to make it work.

It's easy, when you make a change like this, to dwell on the sudden clunkiness, the sense of some risk taken on board, the distance from "normal" working life.

But just this past week I met a terrific contact who runs a global consultancy business from Truro (about 1,000 miles west of me!) and then joined a whole cast of super-smart people at Exeter Science Park as one of the judges for the Tech South West Awards. I have assignments diarised later this year in Ashridge, Cambridge, London and Denmark. So far, so good - business as usual.

But then we spent a Sunday early evening twenty minutes up the road, in the hills around Honiton, with the sun breaking across the fields, the fire pits burning and some local musicians singing requests picked up on their Instagram feed. It's early days, but the new normal already feels like something out of Wonka, Narnia or The Secret Garden. Wonderful.

Now, did I tell you how much the train is from Exeter St Davids to that bloody London? You don’t care do you? Well, neither should I.