NADINE DORRIES: The ache of downsizing has come as an entire shock. My life is etched into the possessions I’m having to forged off for ever

As I write this column, I’m sitting in my new home, a lovely, honey-stoned cottage in one of the prettiest villages in the Cotswolds.

Outside my door runs a babbling brook and everything I could want from rural life, including one of the best pubs in the area, which is only steps away.

Indoors, it’s a different story. I’m surrounded by furniture that won’t fit into any rooms without swamping them; by towers of unpacked boxes because there’s nowhere to put the contents.

I have a small garage full of well-loved garden tools including a lawn mower, but I have no grass to cut now – just a courtyard. What little strip of green there is, is about to be paved.

I’ve just been through the painful process of downsizing from one home to another – and the truth is, I’ve made a complete and total Horlicks of it.

‘Declutter first. Only take what you need. Start again.’ The advice came thick and fast, and I convinced myself I’d heeded it. But three weeks on I realise that, emotionally, I hadn’t even begun to confront the enormity of it. The result is chaotic mess.

I know what I must do to fully settle into my new home, to say farewell to one way of life and embrace another. However, the path ahead is fraught with fear and more than a few tears.

It was four years ago that I first started thinking about moving. It’s a process that many of us must face as we age.

 ‘Even the grannies in stately homes eventually moved into the dowager house,’ one daughter pointed out. I didn’t live in a stately home, but my version of a dowager house was beckoning.

The turning point came one windy winter’s night. There had been a power cut, the heat pump had stopped working and the log basket was almost empty. 

I was freezing. So, wearing a head-torch, I trudged my way down to the log shed in sheeting horizontal rain, filled up the wheelbarrow and pushed it back to the house, where I began lugging the logs inside.

Soaked through and fed up, I asked myself the question: what the hell are you doing?

Here I was, a single woman living in a six-bedroom house and spending every moment of my rare free time bogged down with household chores or the demands of the 60-yard garden.

Bills had become eye-wateringly large, and as I switched the radiators off in the vacant bedrooms I wondered what the point was of even having the rooms. I imagined that my very old and inefficient Aga was laughing at me as it quite literally guzzled the oil.

And then there’s the glaringly obvious fact that when you rattle around in a large house on your own, you feel more alone.

When my daughters left after weekends there, I found myself longing for a smaller, cosy home, easy to heat and to care for. A home that, after everyone has left, would wrap itself around me.

I loved people coming, of course, and I always had a full house on weekends, high days and holidays, but the work involved began to take its toll, too.

The prospect of downsizing grew on me and in the end the decision was relatively easy. But the physical and emotional pain of it came as a complete shock. It hit far harder than I could have ever imagined.

Which is why today, almost a month after I moved in, I am belatedly plucking up the courage to call the auctioneer to empty my new home of some much-loved belongings so I can truly start again.

‘It’s liberating,’ I am told again. ‘You will never meet anyone who has downsized and regrets it. Give it all away.’

And yet it’s so much easier said than done.

What well-meaning friends are really telling me to do is give away my memories evoked by the physical presence of familiar objects that have accompanied me throughout my life.

There’s the first piece of furniture my late husband Paul and I bought when we married in the early 1980s – a pine kitchen cabinet which has no place in my new kitchen. It’s of no value and completely knackered.

But I remember the day we bought it, bringing it home with the boot of the car open, the cabinet held firmly in place with bungee rope – and the pride I took in waxing and polishing it.

Then there’s the pine kitchen table. The table at which all three children were weaned, blew out candles on birthday cakes and where, for so many years, Christmas lunches with family members who have since passed on were hosted. How do I let that go?

It wouldn’t even fit in my new kitchen and so sits on its side in the garage. Just running my hand across its bleached top brings memories flooding back.

I see children’s faces lit up in candlelight, puffs of flour as little hands learned to bake. 

Faded marks made by the odd errant pen from homework, indents from the times I cut through a loaf straight on to the surface. 

The steamed syrup pudding Paul made when we hosted friends for supper and how everyone gasped and then clapped as he turned the bowl upside down and the syrup drizzled down the sides, so perfect was his pudding and so pleased was he. My life is etched into that table.

There are the pieces of furniture that mark significant steps in my family’s journey and fortunes, from Paul and me starting out on life as a mining engineer and a nurse to the present.

The last piece of furniture we bought together was an antique drinks cabinet, with little carved ivory balconies inside the doors and mirrored shelves where his bottle of vintage port still stands. I recall how Paul took on the role of barman at every party and family gathering.

And then there’s the imposing Regency sofa table, now dominating the sitting room … the paintings, some grand and others I bought at amateur artist fairs over the years.

None of these should have moved here with me, but I couldn’t bring myself to let them go. How do I give away the box of lustreware porcelain my father-in-law bought in New York and brought back to Liverpool when he was a crew member on the Queen Mary during the Second World War?

Or his forged steel gardening tools that we inherited, carefully wrapped in oily rags.

I know, I know, they are only material belongings, and I shouldn’t find it all so hard. But who will I be when all of these have gone? What will be left? Will I fall apart? What familiar objects will anchor me and make this new house my home?

I have no answers to my own questions, nor does anyone else.

The fact is, I have to let go. I have to work through the pain and hope that everyone is right. That I will feel liberated and accept that it is the only way I can embark on this new chapter in a new village where a different life awaits.