Northbound

It's been almost a year since we moved into Fox Corner. A year living in the same place. Madness. Plus we've got a newborn baby so we've got all this time on our hands, of course. So obviously we're going to move house again.

We're not just moving for kicks. We have good reasons. The many cockamamie features of Fox Corner are less charming than deeply irritating, and on a daily basis. Lady P takes up way more space than we had ever imagined. Her clothes need a bigger wardrobe than mine. And her sound - her wail, or her 'lovely singing' as I sometimes call it, in an effort to stay calm - fills the whole flat too, which makes it hard for TLOML to work from home. It's time to expand, and to upgrade.

But in our straitened circumstances (my 40% maternity leave pay cut) upgrading in posh NW3 seems a bit foolhardy. Instead we're moving to Saltburn, a lovely little surfer town in North Yorkshire. What's lovely about Saltburn is that a months' rent for a three bedroom house only costs a smidge more than we pay per week for our two bedroom shambles.

Saltburn: it's a lot like Malibu

Other lovely things about Saltburn include my favourite little sister and her family, a Victorian pier, and a couple of excellent chippies*. Plus my parents are five minutes drive away. It's a really nice low-key little town, the perfect place for us to explore family life and enjoy Lady P, far away from the distractions of London's bright lights. By which I mean, we figure she's going to trample all over our wining and dining social life anyway so we might as well leave London for a few months.

This will be our fourth house move together, and my fifth in 3.5 years. Since November 2009 I have moved from London to Beverly Hills to Malibu to Manhattan to London to Saltburn. So you know by now we've got it down. It's a doddle, since every time we move we clear out more stuff, and I get even better at establishing storage systems in new kitchens.

Apparently the most stressful events in a couple's life are moving house, getting married and having a baby. TLOML and I managed all three in the past year and we're still on pretty good terms, so I say bring it on: the Yorkshire life beckons.

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*For American readers: fish & chip shops, purveyors of chips, battered fish, battered sausages, mushy peas - and curry sauce or gravy depending on where in the country you are. Way more delightful than they sound.