Owning your own home

I always find this countryside living and long commute chat completely bizarre. I have a 20 minute cycle ride across Norwich, which I almost exclusively do outside of rush hour because I work flexibly and hate drivers, and even that is almost too much some days. Walking into the centre when I feel like it, shopping at the market, having friends nearby with minimal barriers to spending time with each other, contributes massively to my happiness. I could never go live in a bigger house in the middle of buttfuck nowhere outside of some kind of post apocalyptic self reliance situation.

I dunno if I'm the weird one or everyone else is insane, but I agree generally with pick the location that you need and make the space you can afford work.

Norwich /= London though

Principle applies wherever you are, it's just the numbers that change

How does your model work when the three work locations that you need to be in during any given week are:

• Very centre of London
  
• A business park outside Reading
  
• Somewhere in Europe
  

Simple; Jersey. Next question.

Simple; get a different job

When my train is disrupted, it's always the people from the Isle of Wight that complain the loudest.

I used to be of the same opinion but then middle age happened.

What actually changed tho? Curious

Simple; move to Reading. Install Skype.

Move to a soulless airport hotel room at Heathrow. Now you've got the worst of all three worlds, but there's ample parking and you'll never need an alarm clock.

Don't forget your big plate.

How big is your family? I find people not irrationally compromise their weekday life for indoor space for kids and fresh(er) air on the weekends.

amen to this
no job is worth living some eternal commute nightmare with no friends nearby

Simple.

Except the fact that i enjoy my job & my industry.
My industry only exists in London in the UK and my wife's only exists in London or Edinborough.

I can't commute from Edingborough to London in 20 minutes.

Any suggestions?

Not necessarily correctly I should add, but just that these people aren't crazy. There are pluses and minuses. Also lots of people don't have skills/jobs that allow them to work flexibly and outside of London. There is a reason 2 million people work in Inner London.

I wouldn't be able to work in London without living in London also. But personally I'm willing to take a frankly pathetic salary in order to live and work in Norwich, rather than anywhere else.

No kids, and never will, but I don't buy this argument. I grew up in the Herefordshire countryside, and then in a couple of these South East towns and villages. Sure we had big gardens, but I had fewer friends, never learned to do anything that I'd now appreciate (like BMX or skating), and later really struggled with how hard it was to get to anywhere interesting. My dad was miserable and very absent because he variably lived away in the week or had commutes of >1hr each way.

Any suggestions?

Relocate to London?

Norwich

Being geographically close to family presumably makes it easier to find a spouse too.

\o/

These are changes that are particular to us, compared to our lives when we were in our 20s and early 30s. In no particular order:

1) We spend almost all of our free time travelling to rural areas to take part in our hobbies.

2) We go out much less now and tend to socialise with friends a lot less. This is partly down to the fact that all of our friends have had babies, which we don't plan on doing ourselves, and have disappeared off the radar. Always interesting to observe that some people have babies and still socialise a lot but others have a baby and swear that their social lives have ended for good. It wasn't that long ago that we'd be seeing friends all the time but that has changed in our friendship group as people have more kids and bigger mortgages :D

3) I can work from literally anywhere and my wife can be very flexible in what she does.

4) Finances. We can afford a lot more than when we first bought in London. With the budget we have we can either buy a four bed house with small garden in our current local area or, well, something far nicer for the lifestyle that we have elsewhere (don't want to boast about our budget).

Basically, we live in a desirable place in London but don't actually participate in any of the things that London has to offer and our lifestyles have changed over the last ten years or so.

(don't want to boast about our budget)

Well that's not very golf club

Pft. The LFGSS golf club is for scrubbers.

Newsflash:
Different people live different places for different reasons that don't always align with our own.

TvH did miss a tick by not learning to BMX or Skate, especially as the scene in Norwich was so good in the late 90's and early 00's.