Can a city dweller adapt to country life?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/04/city-dweller-adapt-country-life

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I recently celebrated my 10th anniversary of being a Norfolk resident. I honestly don't know where the time has gone, as it seems like only yesterday that I stumbled up to bed on my first night in my first Norfolk cottage, as a fresh-faced but bleary-eyed 26-year-old London escapee, almost sat on a huge Breckland hornet, then watched, quivering, as my ex drowned it in the sink.

But I can say unequivocally that I love the place more than ever. Life has been a bit hectic recently, so I'd actually forgotten about the anniversary, although fortunately my neighbours hadn't, and I felt a true sense of belonging as they held me aloft and carried me down to the village maypole, where, as traditional song played in the background, I was roughly anointed with mead-dampened morris dancing sticks in my official "You Are Now Half A Local" ceremony.

OK, so I am, in fact, fibbing. I know full well that ceremony isn't actually due to happen for another 15 years, and that it's bog water that the morris dancing sticks are dampened with, not mead. I also would still be hesitant about calling myself even half a Norfolkian. It's only in the last three years that I've really made a proper effort to get to know the place: its Black Dog-haunted churches, seaside reading rooms and moss-coated heathland pillboxes.

What I knew of Norfolk before that came primarily from four years of house hunting: a kind of addiction for me that grew out of a mini property disaster and too many episodes of Grand Designs and had me kerb crawling past barn conversions and sneaking old copies of Country Life magazine into the house under my coat.

I've been in my current house for eight years, which feels like a triumph of willpower for someone who used to have the Right Move website as his homepage. It's an odd, upside-down 1960s edifice, built into one of Norfolk's rare hills, and I am attached to it in a way I've never been attached to any building before it, but our relationship since I became its sole carer in early 2009 tends to be that of a single parent and a giant autistic son with windows for a face.

Maintenance is a constant problem. In the last two months, my broadband, catflap, dishwasher, sewage pump, shower and boiler have all broken, and I've had a leak in my conservatory roof. Were anything else to stop working, I'd start to suspect my appliances were getting together when I wasn't around and having unprotected sex with one another.

Of course, these are things that can happen in the city too, but my inability to put them right on my own highlights my shortcomings as a country person. "I remember you, you're The Author," said a plumber I called about the leaks. What this probably meant was "I remember you: you're the one who spends so much time with his head in books that he doesn't know how his house works", but I kidded myself that it meant I was known from a distance for my bearded air of mystery and self-sufficiency: the kind of rustic literary type you might find in a Thomas McGuane or Annie Proulx novel.

The fantasy lasted until I remembered that, if I was properly enigmatic and self-sufficient, I wouldn't have needed to call a plumber in the first place.

Right now I'm a little stranded between two existences. The amount of time I've spent outdoors in the last few years meant that, when I went into the Norwich Apple store recently, I felt a little like Woody Allen when he comes to at the start of Sleeper and realises he's in the 22nd century. Yet I'm not quite bold enough to ditch my iPhone and when my broadband router's speed falters I'm still so intertwined with technology that I feel like I have a hangover by proxy.

I'm trying, though. I managed to mend the dishwasher and the catflap without getting a man in. But it's in the garden where I often feel most free from the trappings of my namby-pamby past. In the last fortnight, I have built my first fence and dug my first vegetable patch. In the latter case I was careful to select a spot away from the one where I buried my cat Janet last year, as I didn't relish the prospect of a second spring in a row standing in my garden, covered in mud, crying and holding a feline corpse. I also made sure the patch wasn't too shaded and would give my remaining cats the most picturesque view while they defecated in the fresh, loamy soil.

I might or might not have one more cat than I did during my last dispatch: a ginger feral, known as Graham (left), who has been eating my three other cats' food for the last year and a half and pissing on my kitchen blackboard, and who, having been finally painstakingly trapped, accompanied me reluctantly to the vet last Thursday to have his testicles removed. I felt kind of good about this for a while, and it was only upon returning, and watching him rebreak the catdoor, that I realised I'd paid £170 I didn't have for the neutering of a cat I might never see again, and that a true take-charge Outdoorsman might have done the job himself with a rusty knife.

I still have much to learn in my country transformation, but I am getting there. After all, I found a hornet on a log I was sawing the other day, and I didn't even get my girlfriend to drown it. I just gave it a long, hard "don't mess with me" stare, put a photo of it on Instagram, then walked nonchalantly back indoors and checked how the tumble-drying was getting on.

<em>• Tom Cox's latest book, Talk to the Tail, is out in paperback. Follow him on Twitter at @cox_tom.</em>