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Tuesday 25th March 2025
Mathias
The two-hundred-and-ninety-year-old cottage has been on this planet exactly ten times longer than I have. It’s old—ancient even—but clean, and smells of fresh paint. Everything’s made of solid wood or solider stone. Unfortunately for my poor temporal bone, the door frame between the kitchen and dining room slash hallway slash whatever the fuck name you’d attach to this ridiculously small space is precisely twelve inches too short to fit my gargantuan self through without ducking.
I’ve already smashed my head on the beam seven times, and I’ve only brought half a dozen boxes from the rental van into my new house.
That’s atleast one whack per trip to the van.
The hell had my agent been thinking?
In all fairness, it wasn’t entirely Simone’s fault. When I’d asked her look at accommodation for me, I’d given her a list of demands longer than the River Severn, and somehow she’d checked off every item bar none. At the time, I hadn’t realised I needed to include“property should not inflict brain injury”on that list.
My bad.
I’d requested somewhere quiet. Check. Somewhere with a garden, and parking for my cars. Check and check. Somewhere close to training. Check. One or two bedrooms—I wasn’t fussed—but it should be fully furnished, with a king-size bed, and Wi-Fi all ready and raring to go.
Check, check, check.
It should be surrounded by countryside—farms, forests, fields, whatever, I didn’t care, so long as there were minimal neighbours. A few people were fine, just a handful. I was looking for a new place in a village.
No . . . somewhere smaller than a village.
A hamlet.
And there should be a pub. That was the most important factor of them all. A pub within walking distance of my new house.
It should be a small pub. One of those gastro types that served delicious food and had quiz nights, maybe a pool table or a skittles alley, but most definitely a projector or a big screen so I could watch sports.
I’d even asked Simone to scour through the pub’s socials and determine whether it was a football kind of establishment or a rugby one.
This was crucial.
I wasn’t moving to any fucking football-loving hamlets.
She only bloody went and found the perfect place. Fernbank Cottage is nestled in a micro-village named Mudford-upon-Hooke, twenty minutes’ drive from training grounds, with a total population of ninety-eight people. Ninety-nine now, if you include me.
It has a pub: The Little Thatch. The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place my finger on why. The landlord runs an intervillage rugby sevens team or some shit. I wasn’t really listening. Simone had said the words micro-village and rugby and I was sold.
“Yep, I’ll take it,” I’d said.
“Don’t you want to hear the—” she’d started to say.
“Nope. Don’t need to know any more.”
“Okay, but there’s one thing you should—”
“Sim, it’s in budget, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“And there are fewer than a hundred people in the hamlet?”
“Oh, yes. It’s tiny.”
“And Bath is a twenty-minute drive?”
