I had Hugh to thank for the fact that I got to live in The River House. If I hadn’t gone over and chatted to him while he was feeding his sheep, I’d probably not have stood a chance. Over 70 sets of prospective tenants expressed an interest to live in it, in the midst of a bout of pandemic-induced panic renting like this country had never before seen. Hugh, telling me just how many people had been ogling the building, suggested that it might be not be a terrible idea if I went up to the house of the landlady, two villages away, knocked on the door and introduced myself in 3D. I embarked on a 40 minute walk up two very steep hills and, with a dead phone battery, stumbled around until I found a house that looked like the one Hugh had described and knocked on a big stable door. Just as I was about to give up and walk away, a riot of hair in a kimono answered it. The riot of hair in the kimono chatted to me for a while, handed me a copy of her self-published book on mysticism and the menopause, and a few days later I received the news that I’d been accepted as The River House’s new tenant. The exiting tenants invited me over for a glass of wine and told me that mandarin ducks often visited the balcony outside the kitchen. My landlady - at 79, at least ten years older than I’d thought she was - said the reason her hair was so big and thick was that she was a very stubborn argumentative person and her hair, being an integral part of her and hence very stubborn and argumentative as well, had rebelled against the plans the menopause had for it, by becoming bigger and thicker than it had ever been. She told me about the years when she used to live in The River House herself, back when an old lady in the cottage over the bridge used to ring a bell to wake the whole village up. In the early hours, before the bell rang, she used to lay in bed and listen to the boulders on the riverbed grinding against one another. A carpenter who came to mend the rotted decking outside The River House told me he’d heard that the reason my landlady had moved out was that the constant sound of the river was driving her crazy and she needed to be away from it.