No point thinking about it until we know for sure. No point whatsoever.

Besides, this wasn’t supposed to happen right now. Longer term, yes – a couple of years down the line, perhaps. But not right now.

He wasn’t really looking but, you see, it just caught his eye and he wondered when such an opportunity would arise again.

We’d identified it just over three years ago when I still lived down there. One day, we walked past it to have a look. We decided that it was ideal. We enquired to no avail. Determined to leave London, he widened the radius of his search and somehow we ended up here, filled with optimism for our new life in the West Country, with friends and family promising to visit and a glimpse of what we thought we needed.

There is a part of me that craves a cottage in the middle of nowhere, where we would grow our own food and live a life of peace. Ideally, we’d live in a little community with all our friends around us but no-one else. We would bake bread and weave cloth and draw and paint and gather produce. There would be no talk of money or possessions, careers or status. Only simple, natural, beautiful things. We would never need to stray far from our homestead as we would be self-sufficient, so we would not need cars, bicycles, buses or trains.

But there is the small matter, in this so-called civilised world of ours, of needing to work to live. With only one of us able to drive, we cannot live in the middle of nowhere, much as it might appeal when the alternative is a provincial town, the centre of which, like so many places around the country, has become a no-go area if your interests extend beyond getting tanked up and vomiting in the street. Besides, one of us actually has a vocation and enjoys our work (hint: it’s not me). In order for him to get to work, we have to live in an urban area, either close to the school or with a decent public transport system to get him there. So, we necessarily belong in towns or cities.

But here we are just that bit too far away from our friends, from our families. Promises of visits are rarely fulfilled. Driving takes too long, train fares are too expensive (if you don’t book them in advance, as we’ve learned to). It is always us who make the effort to visit others, with only rare reciprocation. It’s a way of finding out who your friends really are, I guess.

So when he saw the job advert for that school back in Hampshire, back where our closest friends are, closer at least to my family if not his, he couldn’t ignore it. Even though I’ve only just started this new job, even though the house is only just getting to where we want it to be, even though we have only just finished unpacking from the last house move and the idea of moving again fills me with horror, I encouraged him to apply for it and he has got himself an interview next week.

No. No point thinking about it until we know for sure. No point whatsoever.