It sounds an idyllic conjunction of smart new houses and bucolic charm, though the fields were probably pegged with people’s washing and the mud, in wet weather, must have got everywhere; no wonder so many old houses have boot scrapers built into their walls. Since then the nearest countryside may have receded by fifteen to twenty miles, but if you have an architectural eye then you can still clearly distinguish the old urban boundary, beyond which the houses are generally late eighteenth-century and Victorian.

Today, of course, Great Ormond Street is most famous for its children’s hospital, which fills the northern side of the street and extends as far back as boring Guilford Street beyond. When I first moved in, last December, I was slightly worried that my view would be of poor sick children on the wards, but  fortunately, I suppose, the block directly opposite is largely an administrative one.

All the same, the street is still notable for the number of children being pushed back and forth by anxious or determinedly cheerful parents, and the road is crowded with ambulances – though because there’s no accident and emergency wing and, I guess, because of the children, they tend to drive slowly and quietly; another lucky break. Still, the thought of all that unhappiness can be quite depressing, and though I remind myself that the hospital is there to make these children better, at times it can still feel a rather sad street. When I told a friend where I was moving she said, ‘I couldn’t bear to live there – I spent three months with my first child in Great Ormond Street.’

This corner of Bloomsbury has a long and distinguished connection with infants. Just up the road, at the top of Lambs Conduit Street, stood the grand eighteenth-century buildings of the Foundling Hospital. Founded by retired shipbuilder Thomas Coram in 1739, it was the first children’s home in the country, taking in unwanted children and ‘foundlings’ – children abandoned in the street. The hospital fed and dressed them, giving them an education and  a new start in life. It was a private charity, supported by the great and the good, and it became something of a fashionable cause in eighteenth-century London; among its most notable patrons were Hogarth and Handel, who gave regular organ recitals in its chapel and who bequeathed, among other things, his score of Messiah.

Dickens was another regular visitor in the following century, but in 1926 the organisation moved away from the smoke and smog of London, leaving its great halls echoing and empty. A developer called James White bought the buildings and, despite widespread public outcry, in 1928 everything was demolished apart from the entrance screen on Guilford Street. A few years later the Hospital would probably have survived, but at least the site was never built over, and some of the finest artefacts were saved (they can be seen in the adjoining Museum, opened in 2004). Today the foundations lie under floodlit football courts, but the vast forecourt, once busy with gaily painted phaetons, still echoes with children’s voices, for since 1936 it has been a public park, to which – as a sign announces at the entrance – ‘adults may only enter if accompanied by a child’.

Yet the walk along the cliffs from here to the Bill, which we do most weekends, reminds me of all that’s astonishing about what another friend used to call This Septic Isle. The cliffs themselves are extraordinary, with the fifty-mile views out over Lyme Bay to the west and the rest of Dorset to the east; on a really clear day we can see Dartmoor in one direction and the Isle of Wight in the other.

Seeing St George’s church rising above the chaos of the Portland-stone quarries always startles me, and there are other, smaller things to treasure too: the fulmars nesting on the ledges beneath Blacknor Point, gurgling to each other all summer and taking short, circular flights out from their nests; the beautifully finished base of a Second World War searchlight position, whose perfectly arced curve throws back an uncanny echo in the open air. Even more magical, for me, are the miraculously preserved ripples in an area of fossilised beach, now two hundred feet above the waves whose ripples they echo, only from millions of years ago. Talk about echoes from the past…

They’re both cheap, for one thing: with money so tight there’s no way I can afford a gym membership at the moment, but running costs hardly anything – just a decent pair of shoes and some old shorts; same with swimming – a pair of trunks and you’re away.

Yet there’s more to the similarities than that. Running give me an exhilharating sense of freedom – the feeling that somehow you can go anywhere, in a way that you’d feel awkward if you walked: down dead-end streets, round courtyards and parking lots, through twisting passages and  alleyways, into areas you don’t know and have never been before. It’s a wonderful way of exploring the city around you, and I’ve surprised myself in going so far – round St Paul’s Cathedral, Tate Modern, Bermondsey, Trafalgar Square, through the City, even as far as the Gherkin one day.

Harder to define is how physically similar the experience of swimming and running can be: once you get into your stride there’s even a similar sense of bouyancy somehow. Even more than that, as I shouldered my way as nimbly as I could the other day through crowds of commuters emerging from Farringdon tube, I could have been shouldering my way through the waves as they fell on Chesil Beach. Strange meeting indeed.

The only drawbacks are that it’s on the mainland (boo!), so we have to drive or cycle there – not very easy with a spade on your back. And though the soil is lovely and rich and deep, as soon as we started digging we discovered that it was infested with bindweed, brambles and couch grass.

So the last week, which we’d planned as a week off, has turned into an epic session of back-breaking digging; after four days of this I actually started dreaming about digging, which can’t be a good sign, but we finally finished last night – 60 square metres of digging done. Which means we can start planting tomorrow morning before heading back to London for a rest. Phew.

A couple of weeks before, chatting to our friend Ben Pentreath at his beautiful house in Littlebredy, I’d mentioned that I was thinking about moving back to London in search of work, when Ben’s friend Will said, ‘How about Alexa’s flat above you? She’s just moved out.’ Our ears pricked up, as both Ben and Will live in fantastic flats in Bloomsbury owned, bizarrely, by Rugby School. The following day we were emailing their agent, the following week we saw it, and the day after we got back from Paris the keys were ours – talk about serendipity.

It’s a tiny attic flat, six flights up, on Great Ormond Street, directly opposite the children’s hospital and just a five-minute walk from the British Museum or the Renoir Cinema. Around the corner is Lamb’s Conduit Street, with its quirky little shops (and Starbuck’s); Charles Dickens lived for a while two streets away, and Dombey Street is round the corner too; all in all it’s one of the nicest areas of central London you could hope to live. We still can’t quite believe it’s ours, but I’m expecting that feeling will wear off fairly quickly once the bills start coming in.

A few days on a gently deflating blow-up bed later and it was time to battle back down to Dorset through the ice and snow again for Christmas: my mum’s first Christmas without my dad, so we headed over and stayed with her and had a great time – as she said the only depressing moments were reading the Christmas cards that said ‘our thoughts will be with you at this sad time’. We raised a glass of wine to my dad, and had a beautiful (if slippery) walk across the fields through the dazzling soft snow, long gone by the sea but still lying thick and deep and uneven in Blackmore Vale.

So the New Year arrives with an exciting new start, as I exchange the island for the city again: I can’t wait to be back.

Graeme found a stone that sadly turned out to be less suited to a bottle-opener than it appeared, but there were plenty of others worth looking at, subtly different yet quite distinct in their material: dark-red jasper from Devon, dark grey limestone as finely grained as a polished piece of hardwood, pale grey pebbles with vibrant orange inclusions, pebbles decorated with mysterious markings like charcoal hieroglyphics, all blended together by their soft salt glaze. If we give too much value to objects that cost a lot of money to buy, perhaps we give too little to those that are free – though, like pebbles, they are at least as satisfying and beautiful in themselves.

I’d always taken the often-repeated claim that there’s more Portland stone in London than there is left on Portland itself with a large pinch of salt, but spend a couple of days walking round town and you start wondering how there’s anything left of the island at all.

Take Regent Street, for example. Its entire length is faced in Portland stone, from the tippety top of Portland Place to the bottom of Pall Mall, but it’s astonishing how many major buildings began life on my island too: St Paul’s, the Banqueting House, the main front of Buckingham Palace, Waterloo Bridge, the Bank of England, the Ministry of Defence, the Liberal Club, the Monument – not to mention pretty much every Wren church there is.

Funny to think that Somerset House is made from exactly the same stone as my house, if rather more finely finished…

They seem to thrive – or at least be able to survive – on the most closely-bitten turf, even right on the cliff edge, in the teeth of the fiercest winds and the windblown salt; everywhere else they’re out-competed by more vigorous grasses and larger plants. If you lie down and get close enough to them their minute flowers smell faintly sweet too, with the slightest hint of vanilla – or at least that’s what they smelled like to me.

Now, Portland certainly has plenty of dogs, but the odd thing is that all the dog-owners I see always seem to pick up their pooches’ poo and take it away with them. So where does this surfeit of shit come from?

Some, no doubt, from the occasional dog you see snuffling around without any sign of its owner, but most of it must be left by dog-walkers who sneak out so early in the morning, or late in the evening that no one else catches them at it – which at least suggests they know that what they’re doing is pretty foul and antisocial. Which begs the question, why?

Living by the sea it’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with our commonest (and noisiest) neighbours, the herring gulls. Hate when you’ve just hung a white sheet out on the line and they crap all over it, or somehow hover en masse above your car to cover it generously from top to bottom in their paint-stripping excrement. Hate when their dawn chorus wakes you up at 5am with a massed screeching that could rouse the dead. Hate the idiots who persist in feeding them, even though they’re easily the most successful scavengers around and there are far too many of them already.

But at the same time they’ve got as much character as Cockney cab drivers and they’re fascinating to watch. Fix one with a stare and it responds with a shifty look, as if it just happened to be passing and wasn’t up to anything, honest Guv. Living in such close proximity to them offers a rare chance to observe them up close right through the year, to learn a bit of their language and to enjoy some of their odder quirks – like staring thoughtfully at their own feet for minutes at a time. They make excellent weather-vanes too if you’re not sure of the wind direction.

It’s mating season right now, and the air is filled with the distracting, and rather revolting sound of seagulls shagging, the male balancing on top of the female (often on a chimney top) and flapping his wings while uttering an all too distinctive series of squawks that can be heard for streets around – talk about exhibitionism. In a few weeks, of course, we’ll have the chicks (two to three to a nest, many of which die in the first few weeks, usually by falling off roofs), and their incessant, night and day squeaking is going to be driving us mad till they finally learn to fly in mid summer. And that’s another story entirely.