I can Picture it perfectly. That is the problem.

On the unglamorous gap between the dream and the paperwork, and why most people quit right there.

Let me establish my qualifications. I am superb at visualising.

Olympic, honestly. Four seconds and a cup of coffee and I can see the whole thing in high definition. The long table under the apple trees, of which there are around four hundred, which I mention because it is the only number in this entire fantasy I have actually checked. The mismatched chairs. The light at four in the afternoon in October, the low gold one, and what it does to the wall of the barn. I have watched it do that maybe two hundred times, and the barn is not even mine yet.

And I am always in the picture. That is what I have started to notice. I am always in it, and I am always the version of me who has already done it, standing in the doorway, smiling, with the light behind me, sleeves rolled, entirely at ease, a woman who has arrived.

Never once am I the version at the kitchen table at nine thirty at night with a headache and a form.

What my head makes, every single time, is a montage. You know the one. Woman changes her life. Cut: hands in soil. Cut: laughing in a linen shirt. Cut: a table under a tree and somebody pouring wine. Three minutes, a swelling soundtrack, arrived.

What it has never once shown me is a chair in the corridor outside a planning office in Sandefjord, and me on it, holding a folder, waiting to be told whether the thing I have already fallen in love with is legally permitted to exist.

That is where I have been living lately. Not in the linen shirt. In the folder.

Everybody wants to talk to us about courage. So brave, they say. So bold. What a leap. Nobody mentions the annexes. Annex B, subsection 4, please attach a site plan drawn to scale.

The leap took four seconds. The landing is going to take a year and an astonishing number of PDFs, and we don't get the keys until the first of August, so at the moment we can't touch any of it. I can only describe it. In a box. To a stranger.

This is where people quit, and it is never at the scary part. Fear is fine. Fear is dramatic, it has a soundtrack, and there is a version of you in the fear that is quite attractive. Boredom has a beige cardigan and a case number, and boredom is what does the killing.

It isn't that I don't know the boring parts exist. My head just won't show them to me. I have tested this. I sat there and deliberately tried to picture myself doing the waste-handling section of the application, and my mind did what a cheap film does when the money runs out. It faded. Then I was back at the apple trees in the good light with my sleeves rolled and I could not tell you how I got there.

My fantasy has never asked me a difficult question in its life. How many people, actually. How much water. Where does the waste go. Who parks where, and what am I selling, and to whom, and how often. Not once. My fantasy is a flatterer and a coward and it has been getting away with it for years.

So here is the annoying bit.

The forms aren't in the way of the thing. The forms are the thing. Every application I fill in is the dream putting on pants and going to work. Every time I write down what we intend to build, I am forced to actually know what we intend to build, and what it costs, which turns out to be a completely different activity from picturing it through a window with a coffee.

The form asks rude questions, and the rude questions happen to be the correct ones. They are the questions the dream would have got round to asking me eventually. It just would have asked with money.

A vision that can't survive contact with a form was never a vision. It was a dream. And I am fluent in dreams. I could teach dreams at university.

So yes, I complain about the folder. And the folder is quietly making the thing real.

The people on the other side of the desk aren't villains either, which is inconvenient, because it is a much better story if they are. Somebody has to know where the drainage goes and it was never going to be me. Half the time the person with the rulebook is saving us from an expensive mistake I was sprinting towards with my arms open and my eyes shut.

You can be a free spirit with a compliant site plan. Pippi Longstocking would have submitted the application. She would just have drawn a horse on it.

And I think the waiting has a purpose, which I say as a woman who is spectacularly bad at waiting. Ask Jan-Erik.

The corridor tests whether you want the life or the announcement. The announcement is instant. I could post it tonight, it would do extremely well, and it would be worth precisely nothing. The life takes a year of unphotogenic Tuesdays, and only one of those two things is still standing in five years.

There is no montage. There is a folder, a kettle, a stubborn woman and a Tuesday.

Right. Annex B, subsection 4.

***

Are you in a corridor at the moment? Tell me what you are waiting for. I will wait badly alongside you.