The cosmic joker

Don't get me wrong. I love the English countryside and always have. I am a walker, with summer and winter boots, far happier with an Ordnance Survey map than your Sunday afternoon guide book, far happier in solitary communion with nature than making conversation with the Ramblers. Besides, I yomp. I like an empty beach on a cold winter's afternoon, country fairs, poppies in the fields in July, afternoon tea in a picturesque tea room, the glory of walking the complete length of a long distance footpath, the light in the sky in a flat fenland landscape, buying honey from a stall outside someone's house and putting the money in a tin, the bench tucked behind a bush on the hill above Jevington from which you can look down at the village and think about what you're going to have for lunch in the Eight Bells. But eek, screech, live in a village?! Hell, I once left a lover who tried to make me do that!

Ah, but the forces of the universe love a good laugh, don't they? And so it is, in the grand cosmic joker scheme of things, that I suddenly find myself living where? Where else but in a village in the English countryside. It's true, no-one made me do it. But forced into exile by hostile takeovers and management restructurings, the pastoral idyll seemed the antidote for a poisoned urban soul. Either that or I took one look at house prices in Cambridge and ran screaming gratefully to any financial alternative to playing Sophie's choice with my liver and kidneys. I mean, I reckoned, as long as I've got a car and a high speed broadband connection, how different can it really be?

I have sort of lived in the country before. For a brief heady moment my father was a solvent and successful businessman, and we lived in a small market town in Northamptonshire. It didn’t take too long before we were down and out on a council estate in the arse end of London, an experience which was only survivable my maintaining a rosy memory of running barefoot through the fields (unlikely, I’ve always been a big fan of socks), building an igloo with buckets of packed snow (true, and I have the photographs to prove it), and spending half the endless sun-baked summer holidays picking blackberries for the hard winter months ahead (okay, so I also read all the Little House On The Prairie books). I went to a small primary school where we did mental arithmetic and sang ‘Blowing in the Wind’, and every year the boy whose dad was a baker brought in a Harvest Festival sheaf of corn shaped loaf.

But oh the past is another country, and they definitely do things differently there. As they do in Feltham, where we decamped to my grandmother’s upon eviction from the big house with the apple trees and the lawn. Feltham has long been known for its borstal, the one so bad any bad boy with any sense tips up his bed frame and hangs himself with his shoelaces. But it has reached all new depths of notoriety in recent years, becoming the national hotspot for gang rape. That came as no surprise whatsoever when I read it in The Guardian as the first experience at my new primary school was being taunted mercilessly and then sent to Coventry for three weeks because I didn’t know what rape was. I was nine. More than anything else, that is scratched deep in my mind as the difference between urban and at least semi-rural.

But life goes on. I hated the estate and still hate Feltham with a mortal vengeance, but with London’s public transport, I had an independence my old friends didn’t have. I had no less space or freedom, roaming all over the capital instead of all over the back fields, to museums and cinemas, Carnaby Street, Kew Gardens and the food hall at Harrods. Studying literature in the sixth form I saw I don’t know how many different productions of Hamlet – Robert Lindsay in a tent on the roof of the Barbican, a West End production where everyone was dressed in grey, a Drama School version starring an ex-pupil from two years above us. I had my first glorious taste of butter chicken in a restaurant in Southall and my friends’ parents came from all over the world. I woke up one day and the nightmare was over. Rural was hopelessly backwards, racist and boring. Urban was cool, edgy, a place where things happened, where things changed.

Greenwich, Hull, Portsmouth, Finsbury Park, Hackney, Peckham, Brighton (London By The Sea), Eastbourne (cheaper London By The Sea but without the beatniks and pavement cafes). Okay, so Eastbourne is hardly Hackney, a bit B-list urban, but with a fast growing young population and a relocation advertising campaign on the back of London buses, it’s working hard on that. In these places I happily idled away the next 21 years. Night buses and oriental grocers, obscure film festivals and illicit drinking dens, living opposite a tattoo parlour and underneath a viaduct, breakfast at Patisserie Valerie one day and the 24 hour bagel place the next. I could buy a pint of milk at 11 o’clock at night when I’d just got the Cornflake munchies. I could count on fireworks on any municipal occasion involving more than seventeen people. And I was just a nameless face in the crowd, able to go where I wanted, when I wanted, without anyone giving so much as half a blind toss.

So it is with quite some trepidation that I’ve gone rural, but also with a lot of curiosity. The Countryside Alliance is far too keen on chasing small animals to a ragged death for my liking, but the whole concept of fighting for a countryside renaissance is intriguing. Is English rural life dead except for signposted leisure activities, posh bastards’ second homes and suicidal farmers? If there is a renaissance, what does it look like? And does anyone who lives here care, or are they just busy getting on with the same old same old of making a living, breathing and dying?

It’s a warm night in early September and I have the window open. I kid you not, I can hear sheep baaing! I mean, how? And why? Do sheep not go to sleep?! There is so much about the countryside that I just don’t know…