Right then, Roger, what made you take off to the country in the first place?
Well, I suppose any one who moves to the country wants their life to be different in some way. I mean, if you have always lived in a city, as I had, then something must happen to make you want to move. In my case I was made redundant, and, when it came to looking around for a new job, I just couldn't face going back into an office again. So I sat down and thought about what I'd really like to do.
And that, I suppose, turned out to be something in the country?
No, initially I didn't think of moving, but just of getting a different kind of job, you know social work with kids or old people, that kind of tiring.
So what happened, why didn't you?
Well, I hadn't got any of the right qualifications, and it would have taken me two years to get qualified and I certainly didn't want to go back to formal education again.
Couldn't you have learned while on the job sort of picked it up as you went along?
No, you have to have a diploma. Anyway, after talking it over with friends who had moved out I thought I'd like to give it a try--after all, a change of scene...
Is better than.., yes, we all know that. So, where did you go when you did decide to move?
I went right out to Shropshire. After all I thought if you're going to go rural you might as well do it properly. The first problem though was how I was going to make a living. There are fewer jobs in the country, so I decided to start up on my own.
That's pretty ambitious, a townie moving off to the depths of the country and setting up his own business. How did you start, had you got any skills?
I'd always had a garden and grown some vegetables and flowers, you know, usual things, salad stuff, carrots, peas, beans, a bit of fruit, some roses.., so I thought of a small holding, a kind of small farm. But when I looked at the prices to buy, I changed my mind; I didn't have that kind of money.
OK, a farm's out--so what's next?
I settled on a nursery and bought my way into a partnership with a...