To Move Or Not To Move

❍Charlotte and the dog, Eric. Would they prefer a garden to the city?

I AM currently making a list.
In the very near future, we may move house.
If we do, it will be out of the city, up the country as they say.
If we go, we’re going to the seaside.
So I’m writing my list of pros and cons.
Living in the country has enormous advantages.
In the village in which we’re proposing to live, there is an organic butcher (good), a restaurant (good), a church (good), a primary school (good) a stream - it runs through the garden of the house we’re looking at (good), a beach (good) and a pub (excellent.)

But then, the house is close to the sea, and the sea isn’t getting any lower (bad), the stream in the garden has been known to flood (bad), there’s no railway station (bad), there are no concert venues - well, you don’t get them in villages with populations under 2,000 (bad), there is only one pub, so if you don’t like it, you’ve got to go to the next one which is miles away (very bad), and there are no shops to speak of (very bad indeed.)
Mind you, where we now live, we have a back garden the size of a postage stamp which has to be shared by Charlotte and the dog.
It’s becoming impossible to park on our street.
They’re planning to build six storey apartment blocks along the road that runs through our area.
There are no plans to upgrade public transport.
And Dublin is expensive.
None of the pubs near us is what you might call good.
It takes an hour to drive a couple of miles to work.
We would really need to spend on the house to get it the way we like.
And we live only half a mile from Mount Argus, where the recently canonised St Charles is buried, which is a nice thing.
But then, if we have a garden, someone will have to cut the grass, tend the flower beds and plant things.
The stream might turn out to be more of a worry than anything else.
Not only are they not going to upgrade public transport in the village we’re looking at, there isn’t any.
What do to?
Mind you, I was sitting at home today, when something dropped through the letterbox.
It was, naturally enough, a letter.
It was from a man from the northside of Dublin who had read what I wrote in the Sunday World last weekend.
I suggested that our Minister for Justice had been wrong to deport a Nigerian boy who suffers from autism.
I pointed out that millions of Irish left this country to seek a better life abroad and were accepted, maybe not always willingly, but they were accepted.
Had they not been, Ireland would now be an overpopulated, impoverished country.
This man disagreed with me, suggesting that a) the boy’s mother had enough money and was a sponger b) sure weren’t the Irish mistreated abroad too and c) we’re not a charity.
This guy drove from the northside to personally put the letter through my letterbox.
Scary or what?
Don’t reckon he’d drive 30 miles to do that.
Well, hope not.
Which is probably the best reason of all for going.