Society
Do people who move to the country expect cheery morris dancers and rosy-cheeked milkmaids to call on them?
Published 10 July 2000
Deborah Bosley's New Statesman article a couple of weeks ago, about the horrors of living in the country, certainly touched a nerve. People have been queuing up ever since to scream: "Me too, I'm also being driven into alcoholism by the tediousness of rural England."
One of the most amusing contributions came from a woman called Jemima Barnes, who was interviewed in the Observer. She had moved from London to Somerset two years earlier and was suffering terribly from isolation. She was drinking too much and was desperate to return to London.
This was her day: her husband was commuting to London, so he left the house at six and didn't get home until nine or ten at night. She drove the children to school, leaving at eight and getting back home an hour later, at nine. From then until she left to pick up the children at four, she was miserably alone: "Sometimes the silence is so intense it makes my head hurt."
But what the hell did she expect? They have moved to a distant spot on the map, while her husband keeps working in the place they lived before. She doesn't work at all. So neither of them are finding new colleagues who live locally. In my Sherlock Holmes-like way, I infer from the time it takes to get her children to school that they have chosen to send their offspring to a private school 15 or 20 miles away, rather than to the local village school, so she isn't going to bump into neighbours outside the school gates.
When they were planning their move to the country, what did they think would happen? Was she bargaining on cheery morris dancers and rosy-cheeked milkmaids knocking on the door and asking her to help them bring home the harvest? Did she think that dryads and naiads would come out of the forests and the streams to drag her off to bucolic rites? One answer to the question of why she finds living in the countryside such a torment is that she isn't really living there - she's perching.
Do people never think that such discontent might be their own fault? In "If", Rudyard Kipling creates a sequence that escalates in difficulty: "If you can make one heap of all your winnings" - precarious - "and risk it all on one game of pitch and toss" - scary - "and lose" - alarming - "and start again at your beginnings" - hugely difficult, but now comes the really hard part - "and never breathe a word about your loss". That's the part that, nowadays, we would find really impossible. A modern-day version of "If" would ask if you could write a weekly column on the subject, have a course of therapy for the trauma involved in losing everything, and then perhaps obtain compensation for the loss because the game of pitch and toss was unlicensed.
There was a curious "extended" Newsnight on the day that David Copeland was sentenced to life imprisonment for his nail bombings in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho in London. The point of the programme was to explore what could have brought about such a crime and what could have been done to prevent it. But much of the programme consisted of interviews with victims, or with relatives of victims, or with people who were in the areas when the bombs went off.
The stories of the victims - especially the stories of those who were killed in the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, as told by their friends and relatives - were heartbreaking, naturally. But the victims of a bombing have no special insight into the psych-ology of the bomber.
A survivor was interviewed. Yes, he said, it had been terrible. Yes, he said, he was glad that Copeland had been found guilty and imprisoned. Then the interviewer turned to an Asian woman. Was it not true, he said, that she believed that the victims in Brick Lane had received less attention than those in Soho? Indeed it was true, she said. And scandalous.
Actually, it wasn't surprising at all, because people died in Soho and nobody died in Brick Lane. But then, victimhood is now a condition that people lay claim to. Remember the people who sued for compensation (from whom? The police? The BBC? God?) because they had been traumatised by watching the Hillsborough disaster on Grandstand. It actually reached court, but a judge told them to go away and stop being so silly.
I hope that, if nothing else, I've proved that there are some activities best done in the country, such as getting grumpy at the state of the world. It's much better for you than drinking sherry in the morning.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
