You may remember I moved home from the small market town of Ringwood, on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire, approximately 225 miles in a generally north-westerly direction to Winsford, a small town in Cheshire.

Now, one of the distinct advantages of this location is that the length of the journey to a certain football stadium in postcode district M11 will have had a significant chunk shaved off it. We can expect to leave the house, have a leisurely 10-minute drive to Altrincham Railway Station which is also a Metrolink terminus, board a tram and, with just one change, arrive at the stadium tram stop around 35 minutes later. There are a number of other alternative methods of travel but I won’t bore you with them; better than 8 hours, though, eh? A pox on the A31, M27, M3, A34, M40, M42, and M6. I have excluded the M6 Toll from the curse – it’s rarely problematic.

If you weren’t aware, a lot of Cheshire’s industrial history revolves around the mining of salt and, if you’re currently watching ‘Great Canal Journeys’ with Timothy West and Prunella Scales on Channel 4, you would have seen them recently visit the Lion Salt Works, near Northwich, not far from where we’ll be living.

The salt industry certainly affected our conveyancing process and specialist mandatory environmental searches were required to be carried out. When we received the enormous bundle of results, I must admit we were quite worried for a while about the proximity of mineshafts – both working and derelict; at one point, I had a telephone conversation with a lady from the Cheshire Brine Subsidence Compensation Board who very helpfully emailed me some useful information, including the fact that no claims had been made since about 1861. I replied, paying her several condiments. Salt of the earth, in my opinion. Sorry, I couldn’t resist it.

During a conversation with my then Chief Executive on the salt mine issue and potential subsidence, I found his advice not to jump up and down and only move around the house and garden on tiptoe very encouraging! I shall of course follow it implicitly.

Anyway, we moved in to the new house on Tuesday 20^th November and, so far, there has been no evidence of mineshaft instability.