Part of a historic country estate, the word ‘flat’ barely does justice to this astonishing four-bedroom ground-floor property. The Albury Park estate near Guildford in Surrey has been the seat of Earls, parliamentarians and bankers since it was built in the 19th Century. The Grade II-listed stately home at its heart has now been divided […]
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We’re due to move at the end of April and don’t know if this qualifies as essential travel
Q We are in the process of buying our first house, with our expected moving in date at the end of April 2020. We are wondering whether, in this current coronavirus climate, moving house counts as “essential travel”. Equally, will removal companies and cleaning companies (which we will require for our end of tenancy clean) be up and running, and classed as essential services? Many thanks, and I hope you can answer our query.
AM
A government guidance published on 26 March 2020 is silent on whether moving house counts as essential travel. What it does make clear is that people who haven’t yet exchanged contracts on a property purchase should put off doing so. Those, like you, who have exchanged contracts can go ahead if the move is to an unoccupied house. Otherwise you should take steps to delay your completion date to which end the government is “working with conveyancers to develop a standard legal process for moving completion dates”. If moving is unavoidable because you’re not able to agree a delay, you must follow advice on social distancing when moving. For the staff of removal firms this could be easier said than done. Given the size of most domestic furniture, two people carrying a chest of drawers, for example, are going to be a lot less than two metres apart; ditto sitting together in the cab of the removal lorry.
Continue reading...Longer, lighter days can help us banish old habits, sleep better and improve our mental health, even during the lockdown
Thank goodness that, in this time of crisis, it is now spring. In the northern hemisphere, at least, we can say hello to green shoots, flowers, bumblebees and butterflies. Finally, the clocks have gone back to British Summer Time. We’ve lost an hour of sleep, but hello, light.
The greatest hope for the new season this year is that better weather will start to make it harder for coronavirus to spread. And for those lucky enough to still have their health, spring can provide other consolations. Its strong sense of a new beginning nudges our outlook and actions in welcome ways. Katherine Milkman, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the phenomenon and found that there is more to spring cleaning than the sunlight suddenly showing up cobwebs and window smears. “The start of spring generally makes us feel more motivated – it’s a so-called ‘fresh start date’,” she says. As such, it makes us feel less connected to the past. “That disconnect gives us a sense that whatever we messed up on previously, we can get right now. Maybe the old you failed to quit smoking or start a lasting exercise routine, but the new you can do it.”
Continue reading...Longer, lighter days can help us banish old habits, sleep better and improve our mental health, even during the lockdown
Thank goodness that, in this time of crisis, it is now spring. In the northern hemisphere, at least, we can say hello to green shoots, flowers, bumblebees and butterflies. Finally, the clocks have gone back to British Summer Time. We’ve lost an hour of sleep, but hello, light.
The greatest hope for the new season this year is that better weather will start to make it harder for coronavirus to spread. And for those lucky enough to still have their health, spring can provide other consolations. Its strong sense of a new beginning nudges our outlook and actions in welcome ways. Katherine Milkman, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the phenomenon and found that there is more to spring cleaning than the sunlight suddenly showing up cobwebs and window smears. “The start of spring generally makes us feel more motivated – it’s a so-called ‘fresh start date’,” she says. As such, it makes us feel less connected to the past. “That disconnect gives us a sense that whatever we messed up on previously, we can get right now. Maybe the old you failed to quit smoking or start a lasting exercise routine, but the new you can do it.”
Continue reading...Gardens have been a lifelong comfort for Olivia Laing. In these uncertain times, she welcomes their green embrace more than ever
Gardens have been the anchor and mainstay of my life, the most enduring source of fascination and pleasure. I started young. My father is a besotted plantsman and after my parents divorced in the early 1980s he spent custody weekends taking me and my younger sister to every open garden within 50 miles of the M25. We whiled away wet Saturdays in the hothouses at Kew, trying to persuade the butterflies to land on our fingers. I learned my first botanical name at RHS Wisley one winter afternoon, lured by the rich fragrance emitting from a nondescript shrub with tiny clusters of shell-pink flowers – Daphne odora ‘Warblington’, a name that has lodged with me ever since.
I was an anxious and not very happy child, and I loved the spell of self-forgetfulness that happens in a garden – the sense of being wholly absorbed, lifted out of time. The places I was most drawn to were shaggy, a little wild around the edges. I agreed with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s manifesto in The Secret Garden: a garden loses all its magic if it becomes too spick and span. It must feel half-forgotten, sunk in slumber. You have to be able to lose yourself, to forget the outside world; to feel, as Burnett put it, hundreds of miles from anyone, but not lonely at all.
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