I’m mid writing one extensive Cotswolds hotel review and a romantic staycation edit under £250 for you.

But as I type, a little person, full of cold, wheezes next to me, occasionally springing to life when the Calpol hits for a game of midnight stickers and loud body part recognition games. Safe to say, it’s not been a straightforward start to our month in Sicily (7 hotel reviews, 2 self-catered stays, 7 magazine and newspaper commissions), with one child currently ill and the other brewing a fever on the flight over (do follow our adventures on Instagram, I’ll leave out the Sicilian pharmacy trips)...

So while I continue to share a bed with a snotty limpet, and have days filled with mothering and journalistic duties (permanent damage control), I thought it sensible to stick to a topic I can feverishly type up… One I hope can help those in the early sparks of deliberation or others questioning a moving decision or even deciding to move back to London from the sticks.

It’s a question that has plagued us for the past 5 years, and one that continues to hijack our day to day conversation, churning any semblance of future planning into soup.

A little background.

We sold a flat in Canonbury and hoped to move West, primarily for the easy exit to Dorset (where my parents were), and Oxfordshire (where my in-laws were), but also for the schools as our eldest was a few months old.

Dreams of buying a high-ceilinged, light-filled stonker of a flat in Notting Hill were promptly dashed as agents jazz handed us the dregs of London's bloated housing market, fat on international investors. Even in Kensal Rise, pocket-sized low-ceilinged cottages (we’re tall) were being flogged for well beyond a mil. I’d flipped three London properties at this point, and just got a sinking feeling about where the market was at, and where it was headed. Yes, London property has, historically, ALWAYS been a good investment, but the prices felt plucked from the sky and the choices were suspiciously uninspiring.

My husband sent a link to a grand, 5-bed Old Rectory in a sleepy West Dorset village as a joke. It was cheaper than a drab three-bed flat in Notting Hill with a ‘garden’ (a cupboard-sized chunk of fake grass) that I’d just wasted a shlep across London to be aggressively pitched.

I examined the old rectory’s floorplan, the high ceilings, the kitchen garden and gothic church views, all goey eyed. A farcical idea slowly winnowed into possibility. It was fast-forwarding five years, avoiding stamp duty hopscotch and essentially parking funds in the end goal (with a painful, soup-for-months stretch). We could let it out for a few years while we rented in London, right? A doddle.

Well, not exactly.

Turns out you need a buy-to-let mortgage for that, (duh), so we swiftly switched gears to living there for at least a year, with my husband commuting weekly and me, commuting whenever I felt a meeting or event was worth the three-hour chug and childcare gymnastics.

I’ll lay out the pros and cons of our first year and a half there. The variables are perhaps more important than this list – that I had a one year old and was pregnant with my second child. That I worked almost full time so struggled with the daytime activities (yoga classes, coffees, walks, swims… generally how people socialise in the countryside), and that we moved to a part of West Dorset where we didn’t have a strong friendship base - most of our close friends either live in London or have moved abroad, a few also to the countryside but Oxfordshire or Lincolnshire. I’d had a baby in London until her first birthday so was accustomed to cruising a yo-yo pram via fancy coffee shops, meeting friends for drinks with a babysitter in situ, and generally living a cushti millennial cosmopolitan lifestyle, mit kinder.

Obviously everyone’s situations wildly vary: finances, childcare support, family-links, work demands, commuting requirements, but here are the pros and cons from my own experience of both city and country living.

Londoner’s fleeing to the countryside

Pros

• Free-range. You can chuck children into a large garden to play rather than booking them into one thousand courses to fill the week. They can entertain themselves for a lot longer and end up spending more time outside.

• The space! Even huge houses in London tend to require a thousand sets of stairs, and you’re constantly forgetting something and needing to trek up or down, (with babies and toddlers is chaos). I loved having so much space on two main floors, so spending an entire day at home never felt claustrophobic.

• Quality of life. We were by the beach, so weekends were pretty wholesome and the children had colour in their cheeks. I’ve only become acutely aware of London’s pollution issues since having children. The restaurants in produce-focused West Dorset are incredibly locavore and, far from polished Oxford, there’s a scruffiness that still permits ‘discoveries’ - an antiques market here or a beach sauna there. Weekends felt like being on holiday.

• Safety. So many nuances on this one but I find London parks quite high stress with two tinies - you have to watch them like a hawk and pray they haven’t just picked up a baggie or ciggie butt from the bush they're ferreting in (though you could say the same for glass in soil in the country of wild berries etc etc). I had a very precise route that I’d walk the pram through our area in London. Dorset allowed us to let our eldest ‘off the lead’ and just exhale a little.

• Friends. Once you get a lovely group of friends, people come for longer - they stay for the day or the night. There’s not the same popping in culture in London and everyone brings delicious deli gifts each time… but it’s more of an event and you actually get to have more time with people. We felt this with having friends down for weekends… we were able to unpeel those boring British layers down and have raw, unvarnished chats. Quality over quantity.

• Finances. Even though stretching for the house nearly ruined us, and as an 18th century Georgian old rectory, we’re regularly presented with various roof and plumbing bills, the outgoings are remarkably less than London. Even with the train tickets. It’s taken us years of living in London, then Dorset, then London again to realise that you haemorrhage money in that city without even realising it… until you do.

• House help. On that note, because of the vast sums we saved by not throwing our card around London (memberships, lunches, taxis, cultural anythings, children’s clubs, childcare, groceries, ULEZ, parking tickets, all tickets), we were able to justify more help around the house for endless changing of sheets with people staying and keeping on top of a big house and washing. It was a real luxury that I struggled to let go of when I was in London and have consequently (and shamefully) spent a small fortune on a laundry company that collects our dirty clothes.

• Schools. The schools in London are (obviously) top-drawer but we were keen to get ours somewhere with enormous fields for sports, and generally outdoorsy activities, without being too intensely rural. The state schools in London are superb but the ones in our area of the countryside aren’t fantastic… but if you’re going down the private school route, countryside school fees are genuinely around half of London’s. You’d spit your coffee out if you looked at the fee list comparisons, geographically,

Cons