OFFERED: (Where I live): New best friend

We daily commit that cardinal sin of incomers to the countryside: we live in one place and blithely drive through it, insulated from its charm and inhabitants by our ton of metal, to go to work, play and educate the children many miles away. It's not strictly accurate to describe ourselves as new to the countryside, having moved here last year from a hamlet only seven miles away and much further from a town of any size than we are now, but we are new to these few square miles and so far have failed to make much of an impact on the social scene under our noses.

I put all this down firmly to renting. Having been told we could look forward to another 10 years in our last house, a decade that would have seen the two oldest children well away from the nest, our daughter within touch of her GCSEs and the one who was then on the way, but sadly not for long, safely settled in the local excellent primary school. With enough room in the house, local authority funded school transport and the neighbour who rapidly became our dearest friend just a hop, skip and a jump down the lane, life was sweet. In fact so wonderful was life that my parents decided to eschew the home counties for Herefordshire life, and so deputed us to house-hunt for them. Through the agent from whom we rented we viewed a house on the Monday. The agent rang on the Tuesday. Ah, I thought, this will be about the house.

Wrong.

It was about the fact that our landlords were selling and we had three months to move out. All I could do was whisper that I would need to call him back. So distraught was I that when I went to find my husband to tell him, he thought at first that someone had died. A measure of how happy we were there, how settled and oh how unprepared for this. A year and a quarter later a different baby is on the way and we are thoroughly enjoying our vastly nicer house with the too-vast garden and stunning views. Hand on heart I'd rather be where we were, but I'm not going to make a fuss.

We are now in catchment for different schools and had the option (in theory anyway) of moving the children. Neither of the older two wanted to move despite our new designated school being the best state high school in the county with results routinely outstripping local independents, and we felt it would be very unfair to our youngest to remove her from the friends she'd known since she was a dot and the excellent school she'd settled into better than we had ever imagined. But for me the overwhelming consideration was that we could move the children, put them through the upheaval of settling in somewhere new and making new friends, then find we had to move again in two years' time and be faced with yet another new school.

Not an option, to my mind.

So now we have a lengthy round trip school run, but the inconvenience is ours, not the children's, which seems fair to me given that moving wasn't their choice. So we haven't got to meet anyone here through the children, whereas a large chunk of our existing social life was generated that way. My husband runs his own business from home, connecting to machines in London via the magic of the digital age, so there are no work colleagues to natter with, at least none within 200 miles. After months of diligent housework and far more enthusiastic writing, I've recently started working 12 miles away as a job I couldn't turn down was dropped into my lap. It ties in beautifully with the school run, and really puts the tin lid on any involvement with local events.

And then there was Freecycle.

Since I first started advertising ill-advised maternity purchases (see first post) and snapping up offers of nappies, I have met several other expectant mums with whom I'm merrily in contact, rekindled an old friendship via a cast-off keyboard and found via old computer kit someone who turns out to have connections with many people and places both my husband and I have known throughout our lives, which is just plain spooky. It makes eminent sense: unless you have just found god and are clearing out your collection of dodgy videos, chances are the person who advertises or collects something that has, or has had, a place in your life is going to have similar interests. In an area like ours where people can be far flung and hard to meet (especially when you don't get out of the car to speak to them), Freecycle has become a social phenomenon.

Let's just hope things don't get sticky when I Freecycle the Freecycled prefolds I've decided aren't for us - is that the internet equivalent of giving back to Aunty Doris the vase she gave you last Christmas? Let's hope this isn't the end of several beautiful friendships.