The First Time . . .

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday January 14, 2009

JOHN HUXLEY

IT'S SOME measure of how cold and inhospitable was our first house that when we had visitors from Russia - a university mate and his Muscovite wife - they kept their outdoor clothes on for two days and spent most of the time glued to a wood-burning range in the kitchen.

The windows were iced inside and out. The water to the toilet, a flimsy box plucked by a previous owner from the backyard and nailed to the side of the house, was frozen solid. And the only reason our guests stayed with us for so long was that the two roads out of the village were blocked by snow.

So much for our suburbanite dream of escaping to the country, communing with nature and living off the land. For Under A Tuscan Sky read Beneath A Tomsk Snowdrift. For A Year In Provence read A Life Sentence In Petropavlosk.

I'd like to blame my first wife but for once that would be unfair. It was my idea to move from the comforts of an English city to the cold, north-east corner of Scotland to start crofting even if it meant taking out a mortgage.

Maybe I lacked long-term commitment. Maybe I was a pretentious, hybrid anarcho-syndicalist hippy. But in matters of real estate I took as my text the words of French trouble-maker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who said "property is theft". And a mortgage is a manacle.

In fact, the first steps in my bourgeoisification proved simple. Not so much sub-prime as sublime. I took a job on Britain's most remote daily newspaper, obtained a mortgage of several thousand pounds from one of the banks that recently went bust and set off in search of property. My memories of the selection process are hazy but involved seeing an ad in the paper, persuading a mate to drive me to the place one evening and, after a brief look-see in semi-darkness, putting in a bid. Easy as - except, when my wife, still in England, asked for a floor-plan it was a hurried work of fiction.

But so it was we bought a four - possibly five - bedroom house, built in the 1780s, with lots of land, in Auchenblae (population 350), about 40 kilometres from Aberdeen. Mates, unaccustomed to commuting more than 10 minutes, thought I was mad. In many ways they were right.

The internal walls of the house were comprised of several generations of compacted wallpaper. The floorboards were held up by being joined to the "walls" by brackets formed from flattened beetroot tins. The cavities were filled with mice in hobnail boots.

Winters were long, their days cold and short. Unsurprisingly, the attractions of working the land proved even shorter-lived. Travelling the Highlands, reporting the Cod War between Britain and Iceland, chronicling the impact of the discovery of huge reserves of oil in the North Sea, I unselfishly left the hard work to my first wife.

After working briefly in a furniture shop, where a colleague was notoriously murdered, she too left the land to use her PhD researching high blood pressure in pregnant women. It proved catching: pregnancy, that is.

Of course, we loved Auchenblae. Still do. But thanks to Big Oil I was headhunted by The Times. Our silly, old house more than doubled in value. Forty years on, I'm still with my first wife but have had several mortgages and live snugly and smugly in the People's Republic of Mosman. What a sell-out.

© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald

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