It was a dreary November morning and George Matheson was not looking forward to another hectic shift, producing live 24-hour international news at ITV's newsroom in London's Gray's Inn Road.
He had given up catching the tube to work because it was becoming too crowded and dirty. Like thousands of others, he had bought a motorbike, rather than a car, which would have incurred the congestion charge.
Depressingly, his route to work often took him past the blue and white tape designating police 'serious incident' scenes. He had recently been diagnosed with diabetes. He had two children approaching school age and a wife who wanted them to grow up in the countryside like she had.
His employers were running a poor third behind rival 24-hour news services Sky and the BBC. They were downsizing.
The offer of a redundancy package could not have come at a better time.
Like many other middle-class families, the Mathesons cashed in on the soaring value of their Stoke Newington home and moved to rural Devon, in the southwest of England.
A study released last week shows that 2.38 million people left London in the past 10 years, 1.4 million of them fleeing to the southwest. They were lured by the promise of better schools, lower rates of violent crime, warmer weather and stunning beaches and countryside.