Serendipity?

On a gloriously sunny day, I was driving through the Wiltshire countryside, a long way from home. Two of us were going to a meeting, I was a passenger, and had not planned the route, so I was a little surprised to drive past the house that I bought with my first wife and have been renting out for the last ten years.

It has been up for sale to fund my current wife's departure from our home. Oddly, almost at the very moment we drove past it, I got a phone call from the estate agent to say that the tenant had bought it. I am glad that this is progressing so I can get on with my life but I also have some sadness at the loss of the fine house.

It's a totally illogical feeling for I was never really going to live in the house again; my parents are in Yorkshire and my estranged family will be in Bedfordshire, so being stuck in Wiltshire was never going to work for me. Moreover, I was never happy in the house. Indeed, it was the scene of much unhappiness for me, a place where my first wife shunned and eventually abandoned me.

But it is a fine house which overlooks deciduous forest and prime farmland and I had a vague notion of opening up the loft with Dorma windows so I could create a writing den; a place of solitude and reflection where I could stare out over the landscape and conjure up stories of ogres in the woods and stolen princesses who are rescued by handsome princes on big black horses.

It was a vague notion that was never likely to happen and hanging on to the idea held me back, tied me to a place that I left a decade and two wives ago. So, it was, perhaps, serendipitous that I drove past it today and could leave it behind.