I shall diminish, and go into the (Mid-)West

I am moving! After a long period of rejecting houses, nervous emails, and an eye-watering wire transfer, I’m heading to Cincinnati in 2018.

And here’s where I’m going!

One of the toughest things about house-shopping (even above doing it remotely) has been to get over my ridiculous imagination of what my perfect house would be. I’m just saying that the chances of finding a board-formed concrete house with floor-to-ceiling glass and a kitchen straight out of Hannibal is…not something that comes up for sale in any housing market, let alone the Cincinnati area. And as I don’t have the several millions of dollars it would take to build it, my imagination had to be bludgeoned into the ground. 1

Having said that, I think I’ve done quite well. It’s not that much bigger than my current house (only by about 400 sq ft, or so I’m told), but it does feel larger, with multiple bathrooms, a finished basement, and a fancy garage.

And there are four ovens. THERE! ARE! FOUR! OVENS!

These will all be set to Celsius by the end of the day, naturally. There’s also stairs! Stairs! STAIRS! I have missed them. And they go down to a basement that has a saloon and Edison bulbs. Seriously. 2

Will I miss Durham? Definitely! It is, in many ways, a completely different city from the one I came to in 2011, and while not all those changes have been great (oh, Green Wall, we still miss you!), for the most part, it has come on in leaps and bounds. It’ll be sad to say goodbye.

Moving is likely to be a slow process; Driver needs a bit of work to get it ready to sell. Nothing too major, but things need to be painted and a few bits around the house replaced before it goes on the market. So for the first four-five months of 2018, I will be splitting my time between both places before putting the old house on the market in the Spring. This will, of course, also include a long ‘goodbye tour’ where I eat my way around my favourite places in the Triangle, and there will be a send-off for Driver which everybody will be invited to!

And of course, there’s plenty of room for visitors up in Cincinnati too! Come visit and I will inflict Skyline Chili on you…then take you to the really good places…


  1. Over the past six months, though, I have discovered that I hate mock-Tudor houses with a deep passion. YOUR COUNTRY DIDN’T EVEN EXIST AT THE TIME. ↩︎

  2. One of my observations from November 2016 is that it sometimes feels that the Democrats would be better off paying 200-300,000 people from California and New York to live in swing states during an election year. Make the electoral college work for you instead of against you. Moving to Ohio increases the power of my vote in 2018 and 2020 elections… ↩︎