Goodbye, big city, hello, county town!

It's been a long time, forty-six years to be precise, since I was born a Londoner. Most of my childhood was spent in North London, the dramas of my first marriage were played out in inner South London, before a shuttle first north, then south, of the river. Virtually all of my politics was done in a city where I had an almost anorakish knowledge of public transport options, and my family, the UK resident part at least, remain snug and warm in North London's suburbia. If you had ever said that I would leave, and of my own volition too, I would have looked at you as if to suggest, "you are mad, aren't you?".

And so it is with some surprise that I can announce that I'm leaving - permanently, I suspect - having sought and won a transfer to the Corporation Tax Operations office in Ipswich, where I start on 1 February. Same job (pretty much), different people, and my view will not be of central London but central Ipswich.

As a result, London will become the big, rather crowded, terribly rushed place where Ros works, a place that I will visit surprisingly frequently, but a place where other people do apparently glamorous things. In truth, I'm not really a doer of glamorous things, although I had the occasional moment when I thought that I might try - exposure to the blowtorch of reality was usually enough to put a stop to such daydreams.

What is unexpected though is the ease with which I have adapted to life beyond the Home Counties. I enjoy the rather slower pace of life, the need to organise social activities, the time to stop and look, rather than have to snatch a quick glance and run. In short, I have been seduced by the relative gentility of country life.

No, I'm not painting a sugar-coated picture of village life, and the notion of a sylvan countryside where bad things never happen is so far removed from the reality that one might wonder why I'm so comfortable. I suppose that I've found my niche in a place where the politics is gentler, where ideology takes something of a backseat to community, in short somewhere where my political style sits better.

So, to my London friends, au revoir. Don't worry, I'll be back from time to time, mainly to see friends and family, and to do things with Ros. There might even be the odd meeting, if I feel the urge. But it's time to build a home and a life, and there's nobody and nowhere else I'd rather do it...