The old vicarage hadn’t been lived in for over thirty years and we, that’s me, a very pregnant Sarah, five kids, Scruff the dog and Tiddles the cat, had lived in two large static caravans with an awning over the space between them on the drive for the best part of four months whilst we cleaned the house to the point where Sarah had been prepared to live in it. It had taken all year to cut the hayfield down. That’s the hayfield the estate agent had described as mature gardens. Eight acres of mature gardens in the midst of what to some was a rural paradise. My paradise is wherever Sarah is, though I'd never admit that to my mates.

I love Sarah to bits. I must do to have sold my house and bought this pile, which is in need of serious attention, off the church. They’re running short of money and selling off a lot of this kind of property these days. Sarah wanted the place, including all the land that had originally belonged to it, which they were proposing to sell separately for building plots, for dozens of reasons. I negotiated for it for only one reason, Sarah wanted it.

Sarah wanted it, so I told Sarah to leave it to me and got tough. I offered a good price which they knew they could eventually get more than, but not quickly. I told the estate agents, "Sure you can get more, maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe the one after, but this is on the table right now, and as you know my bankers are happy to lend me much more than this for any reason whatsoever. I want the whole lot including all of the land for the price I've offered. It's my best offer and you know as well as I do for ready money it's a good offer. Don't even consider trying to bluff me gentlemen because if you try for any more I'll walk away and look elsewhere. You have a week, after that my offer decreases by a thousad a day. A letter to that effect is on its way to you from my solicitor. Don't bother trying to contact me because I'll light the fire with your letter unopened. If your next contact is not a letter to my solicitor accepting my offer then we have nothing more to discuss. Your move, gentlemen."

They backed down in three days. I got what I wanted for my offer. They got their money immediately and I moved my family three hundred and odd miles so Sarah could come here. But hey ho where there’s a woman involved most of we men do our thinking with our other brain. Though I have to say the kids thought it was fun, Scruff enjoyed chasing the rabbits which he never caught, and Tiddles was in cats' paradise with the mice.

Most of my mates still can’t believe that I’d managed to pull a drop dead gorgeous, university educated girl from an upper class family who spoke with a veritable bag full of plums in her oh so entirely kissable mouth and she actually married me. I never told them, but I didn’t have any choice as I was pole axed by her on sight. I made a complete idiot of myself asking her out, but she was as gauche as I and had never been asked out before.

It was an inauspicious start to what was to prove to be the best thing that had ever happened to both of us. Happily, for me at least, most of her friends, and her family too, couldn’t believe she’d managed to pull a self employed builder who could fix anything, including her dad’s lawnmower, and who had built his own four bedroomed detached house which he owned with no mortgage by the age of twenty-two.

I get on with her family though her parents don’t totally understand the way their daughter chooses to live, permanently pregnant and surrounded by kids, even if she is living in more affluence than they are. Hey don’t look at me. I just do what I’m told and earn the money. However, they are glad Sarah has some one who takes care of her because she is a bit unworldly.

The truth is Sarah and I see the world differently. She’s very spiritual and I’m rooted firmly on Earth. She’s clever and knows things. I’m not, but I know how to do things. I’m a time served carpenter who can lay bricks, a practical kind of a man who can manage my kids without their resentment, kiss skinned knees better, build swings and tree houses, fix the car, grow vegetables, keep hens, that sort of thing. You must know dozens of blokes like me, blokes who understand the realities of life, you know, how it all works and how to fix when it stops working.

We’d been there eighteen months when we started on the outbuildings. I was desperate to get a better home for my tools than the ill lit shipping container they were then housed in and set up a decent workshop with windows and lighting.

I was the one who found the box with the £100,000 in £1 coins in it which was lucky. Sarah would have told the the police about it without a second thought. I hid it without any thought at all, which took me a while as there was over a ton of coins there. I did wonder how it came to be there and who had put it there so long ago, for at least three seconds. I thought about things for a while, mostly how I was going to convert the coins into assets, not bank deposits, without drawing attention to anything. Just to be on the safe side I had the property put into Sarah’s sole ownership.

A decade later Sarah expressed surprised at how quickly we’d paid the mortgage off. I told her the business had been doing much better than I’d predicted on the rather conservative business forecast I’d had to provide the bank with, and any money I found left over after paying suppliers I’d been paying into the mortgage account. All true.

I wouldn’t tell the woman I slept with lies. Keep secrets, yes, but we all do that. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have a good talk with themselves. Sarah accepted it without a qualm That’s one reason why I love her. I did get a kiss and a thank you for working so hard though. Well worth it. There’s not a suspicious bone in her body. She wouldn’t last ten minutes in the real world and much less than one in business.

I only ever used the money as cash. I bought a quarter of the diesel cash. I paid a quarter of the supermarket bills in cash. Naturally I used a different garage or supermarket each time. By the time I went back with coins eighteen months had gone by and the staff had changed. As far as possible I dealt with suppliers who accepted cash payments with no paperwork which was ten maybe fifteen percent of what I bought. Their tax records weren’t for me to worry about were they? I made sure I didn’t over do it because there had to be some traceable diesel payments, the same for other things.

I had a couple of vending machines at my yard for the lads that worked for me. Others on the industrial estate used them too. They did a fair amount of trade, and Raj at the newsagent regularly asked me if I had any change and I’d swap him coins for notes to give Sarah when she asked me to get her some money when I went out, and I regularly slipped a dozen pound coins and some silver into her purse. When she asked I told her it was from the machines. I didn’t say it was all from the machines. She never thought to ask again. The kid’s ponies, yes you got it, cash. The kid’s pocket money, need you ask? Those coins never went through any of my accounts, so on paper they never existed. That just meant I could pay more of my traceable earnings into the mortgage.

The coins have finally all been taken from their box and restored into the property where they belong, and I’ve had to put a couple more machines in at the yard to keep Raj happy. How did I square all this with my conscience? Well first of all, I don’t have one. Second if I needed to justify it, and I don’t, the money that was in the property went into the property, and the book does say ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ Now no way can I be described as a religious bloke, but I did utter a silent prayer of thanks that I'd managed to dispose of the hoard before the new pound coins came in and the old ones were no longer legal tender.

Now I don’t know much about Caesar and I know even less about God, but I’ll never tell Sarah about the money because you see she’s the local vicar, that’s why we’re here and why she wanted the place, and doubtless with her Ph.D. in gospel interpretation she’d read the book differently from the way I do.

Oh! One last thought. Maybe I was wrong about me not knowing things. One thing I do know is that in practice possession is nine tenths of the law.