Housesitting with Bente (3)

Spending time in a different city or country, living in a different home—for free: housesitting sounds like a lot of fun. But what is it really like? And what is it like when you do it completely on your own? Flow’s Bente finds out for herself when she house-sits in England.

Time is a funny thing. One moment the hands of the clock seem to stand still; the next they go too fast. And thus I am suddenly ten days down the line. It is my last morning in the house that I am sitting, and in exactly 24 hours I am back on the train to the Netherlands.

Filling my hours was a lot easier than I thought. I sought out adventure every day with a walk in the surrounding area. Sometimes it was a trail of six kilometres, but often it was a route of fifteen or more. I trudged through pastures, stepped (on average) in cow poo three times a day and had a lot of staring matches with sheep.

I was almost continuously lost and sometimes cursed everything and everyone because the directions (not me, of course) were wrong. And more often than I wanted to, I had to make difficult choices that nobody could help me with: Should I go through that pasture where about 30 cows are standing smack-bang in my path, or just slide under the electric fence, for example (I chose the latter option and survived, by some miracle). It was wonderful to be outdoors for so long, regardless of the weather, and to rely on my own instincts. I spent the rest of the time in the house. I wrote a bit, read a few pages from time to time and, in the name of culture you’ll understand, watched all the movies starring Hugh Grant in record time.