I yurt myself today
AFEW years ago, we bought a yurt. It seemed a good idea because we’d just bought a house with only two functioning bedrooms and because other people’s yurts look so lovely—in the pictures. It took three of us the best part of a day to put it up before we filled it with spare beds and other bits of homeless furniture. Despite not having quite the aesthetic I’d drooled over online, it functioned.
Then we began the first significant project at our new house, which was to dig a pond. My mother muttered something about priorities and building actual bedrooms, but I waved gaily at the yurt and told her we had that sorted.
A few weeks later we received a letter from the planning department saying it had received a tipoff that we were putting a swimming pool into a field. Rather dismayed by whichever of our new neighbours had provided this misinformation, we rang the department to explain that we were replacing a disused tennis court in our garden with a natural pond. An enforcement officer said she was coming to have a look.
She came, she saw and she agreed that a living pond was a great improvement on a dead tennis court. Then she saw the yurt and asked to look inside. I proudly showed her. She shook her head. We could not, she told us, have the yurt sited where it was, as, although it was in our garden, it was not within our curtilage. We must move it. Bemused but obedient, we moved it closer to our kitchen. No longer rookies, Zam and I managed to take it down and put it up again in a day.
We sent photographs to show our compliance. We got no response. We rang the planning department. They never rang back. We never heard another word.
Then we set about building bedrooms. The new part of the house would be sited where the previous 1970s extension had been and, as these had never been linked, we were told that our new bit couldn’t be either. Never mind, we told everyone who queried the logic of this, it’s quite romantic to have to go outside to get to your bedroom.
The yurt then took on a redundant, damp and cobwebby persona; unused, unloved and with a whiff of mice, it was a constant reminder that I shouldn’t be allowed to develop Mongolian steppe daydreams when living in a watermeadow. ‘We need to get rid of it,’ I told friends one summer evening. ‘We’ll have it,’ said the husband. We eventually dumped it in their garage saying we’d help them put it up next spring.
Then Zam got Covid. So he gathered up a few items and decamped to the unlinked bit of house, outside which I left meals. On day two, I answered a call asking for Mr Baring. Sensing it was a sales call, I told her he wasn’t in. ‘This is NHS track and trace,’ she went on. “Oh, wait, wait,’ I exclaimed. ‘He is here, but he’s not here,’ I tried to explain. She was very nice and asked how he was. ‘Grumpy,’ I said. ‘Has he lost his sense of taste and smell?’ ‘Well, he wolfed down some lemon drizzle cake this morning.’ ‘Lemon drizzle? He’s lucky.’ ‘Actually, it was very stale so perhaps he has,’ I went on. We had a long chat.
On day five, Zam rang me in the kitchen. ‘They don’t want the yurt,’ he said. ‘She never wanted it. It’s a big mistake. It’s coming back.’ This is not good news, because we’re now dreaming of a greenhouse on that site. A greenhouse requires planning permission. I’m optimistic; after all, the planners unwittingly let us build the perfect pandemic-friendly house. What could go wrong?
Next week Joe Gibbs
I told her Zam wasn’t in. “This is NHS track and trace,” she said