Night school

It goes like this. I'm sitting minding my own business at work, taking a break with a cappuccino and The Guardian crossword, thinking nothing but anagrams, when Kate hurls herself into the armchair opposite. She exhales loudly. Papers swirl upwards on the air current then drift slowly back to earth as she takes a deep slurp of her coffee, burns her tongue, swears and then leans back in her chair watching me.
"You know what you wanna do, don't you?"
"Eleven across?" I'm going to at least try to refuse to be drawn.
"Night school."
"I've got a p and g but I can't see what could go there".
"Y'know, evening classes."
I'm waiting. I know what comes next.
"Languages - why don't you learn a new one? Or, ooh, I know, how about doing one of those Italian cookery ones. That's what I'd do. Or pottery."
I'm still waiting. Any minute now. Wait... Wait... Here it comes....
"You might meet someone."

And there it is. The line that concludes every discussion about evening classes. I want to ask if the teachers are specially trained in advanced matchmaking; I want to know if the adult education prospectus is really written in some weird code like the personal ads that you need to know how to crack if you are to find the person of your wildest dreams and not a dangerous psychopath; most of all, I want to be left alone with my anagrams. But oh no, we're really warming to the theme now.

"Your trouble is that you don't put yourself out there".
I'm starting to crack, I can feel it, but I keep staring firmly at eleven across.
"And you've got lots going for you really."
The pressure builds.
"I mean, mad, socially dysfunctional, and a bit scary at times, but underneath it all, you're quite nice."
That was on purpose.
"Will you stop trying to get me shacked up with some Billy No-Mates who goes to Pottery For Beginners to pull?"
"Ha! I knew you were listening! And will you stop imagining that every single bloke left in the world is a dangerous psychopath."
"I never said that!"
"You were thinking it, though. Weren't you? I know you were!"
"Anyway, I haven't got time."
"Hmph. That's because you're always working."
"Maybe I like working. Maybe I find it more interesting than making polite small talk over a lump of clay."
"Well, don't say I didn't tell you so."
"Tell me what?"
"I tried."
"Tried what?"
"It's Asperger's."
"I'm not that bad!..."
"Eleven across."

But it's funny how things change when you're alone in the country. Don't get me wrong. I'm entirely happy with my carefree life as a single person, washing up when I please and having to deal with nobody's laundry crimes but my own. But within two months my next door neighbour I chatted to over the fence about plumbers and gardens, and the jolly secret service agents over the road, have both moved away. Was it something I said?... I'm not looking for love, I've got plenty of friends (albeit very few within a hundred mile radius), I've got more than enough projects on the go in my life, but it is weirding me out that I can go for weeks on end with no human contact after 5pm. You don't run into anyone when you're new to a village.

So, I thought, remembering all my evening class conversations with Kate, maybe it's about time I got over my prejudice and just kinda, y'know, gave it a go. I have tried in the past. I decided I really wanted to learn something solid about plants and gardening, having spent most of two years of O Level Biology classes learning how to put a prosthetic leg on, this being the teacher's preferred method of mixed ability classroom control. If you can't beat 'em, gross 'em out. Especially when it's your own prosthetic leg... So, I signed up for an evening class at the local horticultural college. Large wads of cash changed hands; I lasted precisely three weeks.

Maybe it was the homework looking up the price of fishponds in gardening magazines that did it... Maybe the lesson spent counting the number of seeds in a flower head... We did some mathematical calculations to show how long it would be before your entire garden was choked to death by aforementioned flower. Point? I'm sure there was one...

Anyway, undeterred by my past experience, I logged on to the village website (now that's cool!...) to check out my options as the new academic year got into gear. Amazing!! Within a ten mile radius of my house, I can do just about any course you could think of, including seven options for beginner's Latin which I couldn't do for love nor money in Eastbourne. Within a five minute walk of my house, I can do Latin Dance as a Workout (yikes! scary!), Dutch conversation (what, are the dike-builders still working here?...) and Cheese Appreciation (that fat milk stuff, not bad TV drama). Wow! What a programme! I can also join the village campanologists, ecologists and volunteer librarians. I had no idea adults did all this stuff in their spare time!

So, I've joined two things in a bid to get to know more people in the village. After all, I do live here... It'd be kinda nice... Wouldn't it?...

First up is the Gardening Club. Just typing those words makes me want to run and hide under a blanket, yelling "no, no, don't make me go!!" But I've done it now, I've joined, and there is nothing to be done for it. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

I have no objection to admitting that I love to garden. At school, I did one of those computerised career choice things, where you answer a ton of questions and it tells you your destiny. Landscape gardener. I didn't remember that until after I'd dug up the third garden, completely relandscaped it with broad terraces, gravelled sweeps and architectural planting. But I've never been in a club. That was all Jill and John's fault, inviting me perfectly innocuously to the Open Day of all the gardens in John's village, organised by the village gardening club.

It was a perfect summer's day. Sunny, bees humming mildly, condensation running down glasses of cold lemonade. And while John showed people round his garden, Jill and I trekked off round the village, nosing in other people's gardens, whispering "I wouldn't have put that there", and trying very hard not to whip out the secateurs and take a few cuttings. At least not when anyone was looking. Perfect afternoon, made even better by a large sherry on our return.

So, I'm sure you can see, it seemed a perfectly splendid, perfectly reasonable thing to join the village gardening club when I moved here. But oh dear, I hadn't figured what else it might involve. Let's face it, in one heady rush of enthusiasm based on a single summer's afternoon, I hadn't bothered to find out! So far, item 1, a visit to a local toff's garden with no plants in it.

"I do vistas and structures", he said, sweeping his arm over his vast swathe of private landscape.
"I've paid £4 to look at gravel and a wrought iron gate?! You're 'avin' a laugh, mate!" I nearly said.

Item 2, talk in the community centre on barn owls; item3, a sunflower growing competition; item 4, a whose got the biggest marrow vegetable show. I rest my case. Ah well, at least my membership has got me a 10% discount card for the garden centre in the next village.

But I'm an eternal optimist and not one to be deterred easily. So now I've started Beginner's Italian in the school in my village.
"Told you you should learn a new language," Kate says inside my head, crossing her arms in circumstantial proof.
We'll see...

The hunter-gatherer

Where I used to live, in the bustling metropolis that is Eastbourne, I had a really good Indian takeaway so close I could nip out in my slippers to pick up my Rogan Josh, the best sit-down fish and chips in town, an offie, a Co-Op open til ten o'clock for pint of milk crises, and a butchers, a bakers and a candlestick makers all on one handy parade of shops three minutes from my front door. And a cash point. But if I'm honest, I didn't use any of those much, partly because I like cooking, and partly because I'm so unreconstructedly urban that going to Tesco's at midnight is my idea of the weekly shop - everything under one roof, no queues, no polite conversation, and everything half the price. And two cash points.

But on moving to the countryside, I girded my loins for a different kind of shopping experience. Anxious about shops shutting at 5pm, being closed on Wednesday afternoons and owned by real-life The League of Gentlemen shopkeepers, I stockpiled long life milk and teabags. Fearing that people in the countryside only ate pork chops and boiled potatoes, I stashed the cupboards high with extra virgin olive oil and porcini mushrooms. And I turned into my grandfather, who didn't go anywhere without a hundred quid in notes, just to be on the safe side.

So, there I am one day, smiling smugly, sipping a glass of chilled fino and waiting for my porcini mushroom risotto to finish simmering, when my Crime Squad neighbours ring my doorbell.
"Hi. Oh, you're cooking..."
"Yeah."
"Oh well..."
"What?"
"Well, we're going for a curry and wondered if you fancied it. There's a takeaway in the next village. We walk through the orchard. Order. Have a pint in the pub while it's cooked. Then picnic on the village green... Oh well, next time, eh?"

And off they go, forks in hand, for a rural takeway night out. A perfect blend of culinary multiculturalism and English pastoral idyll. I eat my chi-chi little risotto by myself and dimly admit, once again, that the countryside of my childhood really isn't the same place now. I decide that it's high time I explore life beyond the A14 Tesco-Mecca.

So, where do you get food in the countryside? "Not in the bloody village shop" was my immediate answer having so far been charged almost twice the reasonable price for any item other than a newspaper. Actually, there are two shops in the village. One is next to the pub, thatched and positively picturesque, but the feeling that I should be supporting my local community never manages to override the feeling of being fleeced every time I go in there. I might not mind paying premium prices if I were buying locally collected honey or handmade sausages, but let's face the harsh truth, we're talking Happy Shopper here...

The other shop is owned by a couple who clearly have some kind of relationship with the Indian subcontinent. Less fleecing, a wider range, and better opening hours, but still not exactly the organic slow-food everything-tastes-better-in-the-countryside revolution we get the impression of from the media. No sirree, it's still Mother's Pride loaves and Heinz soup and Chicken Tonight...

Okay, I thought, maybe I'm still being too urban, maybe I need to look to the producers not the middlemen - y'know, make just a little bit more effort. Unused to making any effort whatsoever to get food I don't go too mad, but I do decide to check out this organic vegetable box lark. It was all quite the right-on thing in downtown Brighton years ago, but here was my big chance to score a zillion middle class dinner-party points by only having my veg transported half a mile down the road. In my head the threat of global warming had already been averted by my cunning new vegetable policy! Oh, the glory!

But nope, living in the countryside it is MORE difficult to get an organic vegetable box, not less. My colleague at work, who lives in the centre of Cambridge, can have a box delivered, no problemo. But oh no, madam, we don't deliver all the way out there - "out there" coming with a curled lip of an expression. And this, despite the fact that to deliver my colleague's box they have to drive more or less past my house. Because, really, the organic vegetable box thing is an urban phenomenon with not a great deal more social responsibility than driving one of those dumb SUVs. It's all about pretending to adopt a more rugged, more "authentic" lifestyle, when actually it's as urban as it gets.

So, that doesn't work. What next? Aha, the farm shop! That'll do it! I'm a Guardian reader, I know all about the tyranny of the supermarkets and their insistence on perfect vegetables. I shall revel in the misshapen carrot! I shall embrace seasonal change and never once yearn after an avocado or a pawpaw! Oh brave new world! Undeterred by the diesel fumes coming off the lorries on the A14, I turn into the drive of the farm shop whose signpost I've passed going to and from work for two months. It's an empty pitted road. There are padlocked metal sheds on either side. There is no sign of a shop. There is no sign for a shop. There is no-one to be seen and I remember that in all those journeys I have never once seen a car going in or out. And because I'm immediately into horror movie territory involving isolated houses, rabid dogs and in-bred farmhands, I quickly swing the car round and screech back onto the main road. I'm afraid of the country! How rubbish is that?!!

I drive slowly back to the village, feeling distinctly pathetic. Needing to cheer myself up, I stop at the plant stall, a village enterprise that involves me acquiring a quirky selection of well-bred herbaceous perennials for only a pound a time. Now that beats the urban garden centre (key outlet for macrame kits, and remaindered books) hands down. And on the shelf are some handwritten clues to the homegrown whereabouts - carrots 50p, runner beans 60p - except I'm too late; the shelf is empty.

Whether it's a useful personality trait or just bone-headedness, I'm not one to give up easily, and I'm not about to give up the quest for decent rural food. Idly flicking through the local paper, I find another line of enquiry - the monthly farmers' market. Surely this will be it?! I cut out the ad and stick it into my diary - come hell or high water, I shall be there!

The day breaks into fine Autumn sunshine. Full of the joys, I lace up my walking shoes, throw the pink townie rucksack over one shoulder and stride off along the footapth. Although the small market town I'm heading for is off-map, I figure that as it's on the same river I walk along on my daily ramble, I have only to keep to the bank and I'll get there eventually.

It truly is a glorious day and a glorious walk. Longboats chunter along at a few miles an hour, their occupants waving cheerily as they pass me. A couple stop to ask me if the path goes to the old railway bridge. A small boy in a red jumper standing quite alone in the middle of the footpath greets me with "I found a toy! I found a toy!".
"Well, that's a strange thing to find along a footpath", I say, wondering if this is some agrarian waif quite used to wandering footpaths alone, or if I should be ringing the Missing Persons Hotline.
"Just there", he says, pointing to a patch of scrub beneath the ancient overhanging trees.
Then I see his dad and his brother and the family dog bounding up behind him and I start panicking that I look like a distinctly dodgy character, making small talk with a small boy in a wood.
"Oh hello", says dad, beaming, "what's he up to now?"
"I found a toy!"
"He wanted to show someone", I edge in nervously.
Dad bends down to look at the very grubby indeterminable toy in question, and then looks up and winks at me, "ah, treasure, my lad, treasure". And then off they go on their adventures, and I'm beating along the footpath again, wondering if all people living in the countryside are just born really nice (and good-looking, well-dressed and funny), or if it's a by-product of residence. There may be hope for me yet, if only I could master the art of speaking naturally to strangers...

Eventually I come to the town, and from the time it's taken and knowledge of my usual walking speed, I reckon it's been about a five mile walk. And a five mile walk on a sunny day must deserve a shandy and a sandwich in the garden of a riverside pub. I smile benevolently at wedding parties and children, and watch two thirteen year old boys as one teaches the other how to fish. They're wearing Adidas trackies, baseball caps and and hoodies, and I wish for the 97th time that I had got round to buying a digital camera because their silent concentration on a harmless outdoor pastime defies the media-induced frenzy about teenaged boys. Well, harmless as long as you're not a fish, that is...

And so to the much vaunted farmers' market. Well, much vaunted by some, but on the wet fish van I first encounter there is a big sign saying "This business is NOT part of the farmers' market!" Strange, methinks, what's the issue?... I dawdle about, eyeing up the dressed crab and the naturally smoked haddock, thinking that at last I've found some real food for sale, and that I might ask about the sign, but after five minutes waiting for the stallholder to get off her mobile, I give up on both and wander off towards the rest of the market.

And it is a huge disappointment. It's a faux-market, a phoney replica of some rural vision that has very little to do with the buying and selling of local produce. It's a Chamber of Commerce event that seems to have far more to do with bringing day trippers into the town than it has to do with food. It's not real, but it seems to be achieving its purpose as there are plenty of people milling vaguely around in holiday spirits. They each have one small purchase, clutched in their hand like a prized souvenir. It's not dinner.

There is an ostrich burger stall - er, yep, that's a stall selling burgers made from ostrich meat, which you can buy in small take-home packets if you enjoyed it and want to recreate the experience for all your family and friends. It stinks. There is a stall selling jars of jam for three pounds fifty. Three pounds sodding fifty for a jar of jam?!! I don't care that it comes with a little gingham cover and a neatly handwritten label - it's still only jam!!! A cake stall selling half pound cakes, also for three pounds fifty. A plant stall and one selling hand made cards - guess how much each? Yep, you guessed it.

Oh well, I think, at least the vegetables will be organic and fresh. And to be fair, they do look good. But I live by myself and everything has been bunched and bagged in large quantities that I just can't use. I walk around, trying to find a stall where the produce is loose, and I will feel less bad about asking for two or three of an item instead of by the kilo, but there isn't an option. Determined to buy something, I eventually settle on a bunch of carrots so large it fills my rucksack. The stallholder scowls at me when I decline anything else. She's clearly not selling much and though I could make a few suggestions, based on my experience of several years shopping on the very real, exciting and always interesting Berwick Street market in London, I keep it buttoned. My question about the fish stall sign has been answered. I wouldn't want to be associated with it much either. It's a sham and a shame.

But my trip is not in vain because on the way back, just near the point where the small boy in the red jumper stopped me, I discover a crab apple tree and at last I have sourced all of the ingredients for the hedgerow jam recipe in my Women's Institute recipe book. I pack a load of them in among the carrots and resolve to go out soon to pick the other things I've already spotted: the haws and the rosehips, blackberries and elderberries and sloes. It seems that I've finally found the answer to rural food: you have to forage for it yourself. The Neanderthal hunter-gatherer deep inside me lets out a happy satisfied yowl. The 21st century city-girl wonders for a moment how long she can live on a diet of berries, and for slightly longer about what time Tesco's closes on a Sunday....

The oiling of the wheels

"Oooooh", my urban friends winked, when they heard I was moving to a village. "Everyone'll know all your business, you know." They shuddered at my prospect and wandered away.

Well, it is true that as I waved cheery hellos to my new neighbours, three and a half seconds after the arrival of the removals truck, they did show a mildly alarming enthusiasm, and yes, they did already know my age, occupation, and where I had moved from. Which was all the more surprising given that no-one in the street had any conversational truck with the previous owners of my house. As I dropped little tidbits of information into doorstep chat, I wondered by what mechanism it was transmitted. Okay, I live on a lane, and lanes are narrow by definition, but were the others really texting each other live updates?

I was standing at the kitchen sink the following Saturday morning, washing up in a vague singalonga Radio Two kind of way, and idly gazing into the street. Very idly, because I didn't see anyone coming up to the side of the house, and then, always a bizarre phenomenon in my household, the doorbell rang. As I wrenched open the sticking door, a hand was immediately thrust forward to shake mine warmly.
"Hello", said a wiry man in cycle clips and a shiny red skid lid. "I'm John."
"Erm, hello", I muttered, not entirely sure whether the rules about talking to strangers apply in a village, and wondering what what real villagers might say in this situation. Come on in, I've just made a pot of tea?....
Then he delved into the satchel over his shoulder.
"I'm the postman", he beamed, as he handed me two bills.
That's the postman. Not your postman. Though I have since seen a smiling woman cycling round the village, a very nifty red Post Office bike-trailer behind her, so maybe there's two of them. Maybe she does the parcels. Maybe they're a couple?...
I took the bills and smiled a still stunned thankyou. I've never known my postman's name before.
"Righto", he said, throwing a leg over his crossbar. "If there's anything you need, just let me know."
And off he went, really actually honestly whistling a merry tune, while I gaped after him, thoughts of village drug rings and Postman Pat competing wildly in my brain.

But I've figured it out now. It took me a while but the lynchpin in the communications network is the lollipop lady. And she lives next door. Hardly the lollipop lady of your imagination, this is your twenty-first century version, with two little kids of her own, a fluorescent yellow jacket that makes her look like a cop, and her own small business as a male grooming beautician. Male grooming beautician? In a village in the English countryside?! Now, I had a friend in Brighton who was a beautician, and I consequently know far more about the gay clientele's penchant for the back and crack wax than I ever needed to know, but that was Brighton and this is here. Once again, my mind is leaping conversational somersaults that leave me incapable of anything but gawping and letting my interlocutor continue.
"A lot of men want to look good", she proffered, sensing my brain frenzy. "You know, groomed. Like footballers and Jude Law."
"Oh", I said. "I see."
Who's urban now, eh?!

The lollipop lady who looks like a cop in her standard issue waterproof is married to a cop. He doesn't look like a cop, though. That may be because I haven't yet seen him in uniform, but it may also have something to do with the fact that on bank holidays and any weekend involving a birthday, he lets loose his inner karaoke king. Who needs the crazy streets of downtown Tokyo when you've got a big screen TV and a backing track CD? But here's the thing: he's good, he's got guy friends he duets with, and the bizarre fact is that they're all as straight as a die! As I marvel at the socio-sexual revolution that is SO not how I expected things to be, I can't help feeling that once again it's me who's the hick from the sticks...

And what's this with all the cops? I'm not so urban that I think everyone who lives in the country is a farmer, a vicar, or a teashop owner, but this village is like some nerve centre for the security services! The cop next door. Over the road, she's ex Foreign Office and he makes maps for The Government. And then there's Bob.

In my new job I sit at a desk all day, most days. Being blessed with more physical energy than I generally know what to do with, but no gym in the village, I've taken to going for a four mile walk when I come in from work. Sometimes I run, but hey, why bother when there's sky to look at, and squawking geese-fights, and Turneresque cows drinking at the water's edge? Beats MTV.

So, I'm out on my usual circuit one fine evening, over the road, down past the immaculate village allotments, and the windmill that's now a kennels (with a sign on the door that says "please don't ring our doorbell to tell us we're closed"). Then up past the groaning blackberry bushes and the sloes and the rosehips, and all the other ingredients of the Women's Institute hedgerow jam. Oh, yes, hmm, I'd better come clean now. I've bought the WI jam making handbook... When in Rome do as the Romans?.... And so, on past the lakes, turn right, gaze forlornly at the pub on the opposite bank of the Great River Ouse, wondering why, oh why, it is so tantalisingly close and yet no bridge for four miles in either direction, and then back towards the village along the old fenland drainage channel.

And there I am, yomping breezily along in a world of my own, when up pops Bob. He's standing at the stile I need to cross. I slow down to give him a chance to come over, but he's looking puzzled and not moving.
"Hello", he smiles. "I'm Bob."
I'm starting to wonder about this village, really I am.
"I'm lost."
"Hmm", I mutter, once more reduced by a surprise introduction to the conversational grace of a moody teenager. "Where are you trying to get to?"
And that's it, Bob's off. He needs no help in this conversation. All I have to do is show him the way back to the village and everything I need to know about high security policing is mine.

Because Bob's a copper! Not just any old copper, oh no! Having had a stint teaching the Bosnians how to investigate murder, Bob's back in Britain guarding foreign emissaries - young people of extraordinarily high diplomatic importance who are pursuing their studies at Cambridge University.
"Cool", I nod appreciatively. "Like in the West Wing when Zoe and Charlie..."
And I stop short there, because I've only just met this guy, he's already given me the full details of his divorce, asked me outright about my marital status, and moving into territory that involves Zoe and Charlie's sex life is not where I want to go. He nods vaguely, obviously not an Aaaron Sorkin addict, and tells me all about his bodyguard duties.
"I'm trying to lose weight", he puffs as we reach the edge of the village. "You wouldn't like to do this again tomorrow, would you? I hate walking on my own."
I don't, though Bob's a friendly guy and he's not hitting on me really, he just wants someone to talk to because he's new in the village too and meeting people is hard. But out in the country, I'm a solitary walker, and that's the way I like it.

But it's because of Bob that I finally solve the communication network conundrum. He made me think about how people over the age of 35 get to know other people, especially when you live in a village and the statistical odds are stacked against you. The ex Foreign Office neighbour, pregnant with her second, had already given me a clue. It's about kids and the immediate network that provides of parents, and teachers, and, especially, lollipop ladies. She stands by the side of the road, keeping a weather eye on the morning whip-through to the main traffic artery, as the other neighbours come and go, dropping off their kids, pausing for a brief moment to pass the time of day, and swapping what information there is to be had. It's not nosy, it's not gossiping, just factual oiling of the village wheels, and strangely, I'm glad these people know my business.

What little business there is to know…

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…