Living the Good Life

If you read this site you may be forgiven for thinking that we have just woke up one day and thought "I know - lets move to Nova Scotia" but that is far from the truth.

Although in some respects the move to Nova Scotia is the beginning of our journey it is also the end of another one as it has taken us a long time to come to the conclusion that this is the right thing for us to do.

Without going back to the beginning of our lives (or even our life together which began almost 15 years ago) I will start at the point a few years ago where we came to the conclusion "there must by more to life than this". I wonder if this is a thing that happens to a lot of people in their 30's? I think we spent quite a while in our 20's trying to sort things out - pay off student debts, buy a house, get cats, try to succeed at work, acquire the trappings of life we felt we ought to have.

We have always been keen on the garden and being outside. It was the large garden in our 1930's suburban semi in Leeds which persuaded us to buy our house 10 years ago. We have been keen on growing things all this time - potatoes, courgettes, beans, tomatoes, sweetcorn. The nicest thing about the garden is the time we spend in it during the summer. Lying under our oak tree you would never guess you were only 2.5 miles from the centre of Leeds, a city of about 750,000 people.

As we started to get more interested in producing our own food we made the decision to get some chickens. We had thought about it for a while but it wasn't until we visited friends in Wales and met their chickens and realised they were fairly easy to look after that we took the plunge. Four chickens were added to the family in August 2004 and have been a big hit. They are a hell of a tie and luckily our good neighbours have helped us and looked after them so we have been able to have holidays.

I am sure you can imagine how many "Good Life" jokes we had.. just smile and pretend its the first time you have heard it.

The arrival of the chickens was probably the start of the inevitable. Interest in producing things, living simply, enjoying doing things together and being happy started to look far more attractive than working longer hours, having more stress, earning more money and buying more crap we didn't need. We have never been "house" people and I suppose a lot of people put their energies outside work into their homes, clambering desperately up that property ladder to buy bigger, more luxurious houses in more exclusive areas. I have seen people I know do this and realised it was not for me. To me that just involved a bigger mortgage and more stress, less freedom, being more trapped by work and longer commutes and less time to enjoy life.

We did look at seeing if we could buy somewhere in the UK, either near here to carry on working (even with a longer commute) or the ultimate dream of giving up work. We realised that to do this was uneconomical. We would be saddled with far too large a mortgage and I would be trapped in work for ever more with longer commutes and less time to enjoy together and enjoy any sort of "new life". The sort of mortgage we would need would not permit reducing working hours or doing a less stressful job. Now this would be fine if the wish to live a simpler life was only the ambition of one of us. Commuting to the office and leaving AJ at home would have allowed us to buy a smallholding or an old farm but I am convinced my life expectancy and certainly quality of life would have suffered - sorry but I am not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. I am sure I would have been an unpleasant stressed up nasty after slogging home day after day and many weekends of working too.

So this is where Nova Scotia comes in. Cheap housing was the first attraction. A way to live a simple life but no mortgage? Now that opened up more possibilities for working in different ways and different patterns. Without a mortgage (which lets face if was going to be about £1,000 a month if we moved anywhere in the UK) we would have far more freedom and opportunities. But would we like it? When we first seriously started thinking about it - January 2005 - my first thought was - lets go - lets go see it. If we don't like it we need to think again. So in January we booked to visit my sister in Toronto and fly to NS for a few days. And thevideoss on this site show our thoughts on that visit.