Exeter

‘You’ll never leave London,’ opined my daughter in a tone which did not brook contradiction. ‘You’re too cautious,’ she declared.

Afterwards I reflected on this. Of her quarter-century lifetime, I’d spent twenty years in the same job and seventeen in the same flat. I could see her point, or rather, her point of view. Earlier in life, I’d been far from cautious. Education, jobs, relationships: all had been wrecked by recklessness and having latterly achieved some stability, wariness was the counterbalance which sustained equilibrium.

Buzz is the term commonly found in websites designed to extol the virtues of big cities. Translated, it means crowds, noise and pollution. Acceptable prices to pay if you value café culture, fringe theatre and big-name entertainment. Less so if your priorities are tranquillity, solitude and country walks.

I’d moved to London in 2000. A small flat, intended as a pied-a-terre, became a permanent home equidistant from City offices and City airport, the axis which governed my working life. Periodically I’d review my disengagement from the world-class culture on offer and resolve to exploit the facilities for which London was renowned and for which, one way or another, I was paying. But major exhibitions, plays with acclaimed directors, concerts under the batons of legendary conductors, all required booking months in advance and after giving away handfuls of expensive tickets stymied by last minute travel commitments, I gave up. The low-end alternative, mingling with the groundlings at the Globe or sweating in the arena at the Proms, were no longer feasible. I can walk a dozen miles but standing still for two hours is a torture hardly conducive to the enjoyment of a sublime experience.

Visits to friends in Exeter triggered wistful incomprehension. Was it possible that exiles from London could really find satisfaction in a sleepy town of 120,000? Where was the catch?

The train journey seemed endless. I often flew to Stockholm and back in the time it took the train from Waterloo to meander to St David’s. Paddington trains were only marginally faster. Then I discovered there was a short cut. Like a rambler desperate to reach the tea shop before it closes, some trains scamper across the fields, shunning Bristol to head straight for the historic capital of the southwest and making it to Exeter in little more than two hours. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so far away.

Paying obeisance to caution, I decided to rent for a few months. Unlike in London, which has to cater to an incessantly shifting population, most rental properties in Exeter are unfurnished. I transferred the minimum from London: coffee machine, DAB radio, my best kitchen knife, the essential accoutrements of civilisation. I borrowed chairs and tables from friends and bought an unfashionable but comfortable sofa from a charity. To make the most of the unaccustomed luxury of a deck, I invested in a garden dining set and a magnificent parasol which hung over the table like an albatross.

The flat is in a cul-de-sac. There is no traffic and everyone says hello. The back garden falls away into the river and some of my neighbours have moorings with small boats. Mine has a concrete platform from which I can lower myself into the river to cool my legs or practise a tentative breaststroke before becoming a prisoner of water weed. A riverside park lies opposite. Through it I can walk to the Quay, the ancient hub of Exeter’s international wool trade, in minutes. The town centre, which would not disgrace Oxford Street, is little further. In the other direction, the walk is endless. It’s an hour to the open sea, assuming I can resist the temptations of two award winning pubs with generous gardens overlooking the estuary. Beyond that lies the coast path and the entire south-west peninsula awaits.

From the window of my London flat, I once counted thirty-two cranes; at night, there is a red light atop each one. In Exeter, the night horizon is dark, marred only by a single beacon on a distant incinerator chimney whose intrusion has apparently enraged local nimbies who have a different baseline from Londoners.

My daughter, who spends her free weekends in Berlin or Amsterdam and summer holidays at the Edinburgh festival, came to visit. We walked to the Quay and and I pointed out the Boat Shed, a defunct warehouse being developed as an arts centre. After stopping for coffee by the seventeenth century Custom House, we walked to the cathedral and admired the new gargoyles, part of the endless cycle of maintenance of a nine hundred year old building.   

Back in the flat, she gazed at the river where a kingfisher had just flitted across the weir.

‘I can see why you might want to live here,’ she conceded.