How do you know....
.... when it's time to leave town?
I think Dr Johnson often talked a lot of crap.
He probably didn’t even mean most of it, as most journalists don’t really mean 90% of the bilge they (we) come out with. When you are a journalist you really mean everything you say for the first 18 months that you are working. Then you totally and utterly run out of opinions and to avoid repeating yourself endlessly, and quickly becoming completely irrelevant, you have to start putting opinions on in the morning, like clothes. I don’t mean telling lies, I mean blowing up small opinions like a balloon and seeing if you can get to 750 heartfelt words out of it without it popping in your face.
I go a bit misty-eyed when I read young journalists, freshly arrived in the nationals, hammering away at the points they’ve been waiting 24 years to make. Rage, they go. Rage, rage, rage! Then two years later it all goes a bit quiet. Then they start having to write about their cats, like the rest of us.
Anyway. I particularly dislike the thing Johnson said about how only a fool writes for any reason other than money. That snobbery about writing without commission is really poisonous - writing is the best, easiest and cheapest thing you can do for your psychological health. If you are feeling crappy, start a diary. Also, Dr Johnson didn’t have a great deal of contemporary competition for his commissions. I’d like to see him having to compete with thousands of other young scribes online, all scrapping over the same 400 down-page feature in a national, and still be so pompously breezy about it all. Twit!
And then there’s the thing about being tired of London meaning being tired of life. That one stings, too. I bet he regretted writing it about six months later, when he (for example) went to see a friend in Suffolk and took a walk along the beach and said “Wow this is the life,” and was just about to set off to peer into the estate agent’s wobbly glass window in Aldeburgh and then thought, “O damn, everyone will think I’m tired of life if I move here. Sucks to be me!”
Does leaving London - or a big town - mean you’re tired of life? Does it? Or does it mean you are done with a certain sort of life.
I am a Londoner. It is my blessing and my curse. I was born here and until recently I assumed completely that I would die here. And yet. About two years ago - nothing to do with Covid - I started suddenly hankering very strongly after a certain sort of very cosy edge-of-village or edge-of-small-town existence. I don’t know what prompted it, it genuinely crystallised out of thin air around my head. Roses climbing somewhere, a door opening out to a garden, a village hall, miles of sky, feeling very connected to seasons, owls hooting in the darkness, a local pub. Locals.
And it is a weird feeling because I love my house in London. It is a rickety narrow townhouse, messy, full of crap with cat hair all over the place, but it feels like home. Having lived in places in my twenties that did not feel like home I know what a precious commodity that is.
And yet… and yet. Where I live is grimy and in the summer it stinks. Genuinely, on my local Nextdoor website there are endless grumbles about the pervasive smell of poo and drains.
And there are so many people where I live. I’m not one of those “I hate people” people, but there are so many of them. And so many dogs. My god, the dogs! Again, love dogs. LOVE them! I am a cat person but I very much like dogs. But not literally ten thousand of them. All crapping all over the pavements. My new school run is a twenty minute walk along local pavements and my god, the rivers of shit. It’s like those descriptions of ye Olde London when horses and sheep and dogs and chickens and whatever squatted merrily in the gutter and people regularly heaved more crap out of their windows and let it splatter wherever. That’s how much excrement there is around where I live.
Of course, much of it supplied by the local foxes, which are now so vast in number that they basically run Camden council. They also like, most of all, in their leisure time to rip open filthy bin bags filled with more shite, nappies and mouldy old food and strew the contents across pavements, roads and front gardens.
And crime is everywhere, commonplace. At some point, I know that both of my children will be mugged and I just pray, really I do, that it is a harmless drive-by phone snatching and not a really scary confrontational thing. I never expect in the morning for our car, or anyone else’s, to still be there. We have had three separate cars stolen and have been burgled. Like those surprising warm or cold patches in the sea, every so often I am blasted in the face by the strong scent of skunk cannabis.
And. In the same way that Paris is not France and New York is not America, London isn’t really England. It is a weird, heaving, ultra-convenient bubble. I do wonder if I am denying myself something, in not living in England, in its countryside, among its birds and trees and wildlife.
I do understand what the countryside is like, by the way. I know that in certain parts there might be no taxis or takeaways, that the winter goes on for a long time and it is muddy and dark and cold, that if you cannot ride a horse, then what’s the point of you?
Could I ever live there, though? Would I? Would you? Did you? Please share your story with the group in the handy box below.
I grew up in the countryside and I think about this too, but seriously, my kids are roughly the same age as yours — am I really going make friends with the neighbours without the (awful but useful) camaraderie of primary school? Do I actually want to get really into seasonal cooking again? Didn’t we do all that to death in lockdown? I think in part the yearning for the countryside is the first lash of a midlife crisis trying to insinuate you don’t fit in among all the busy young people. But if you stuff your ears and ride it out, you can ease into kids moving out, flat at the Barbican, going to the theatre all the time, learning Ancient Greek and having one boiled egg and the Times cryptic at the Wolseley whenever you feel like it. Retirement in the country just feels like loneliness and day drinking. I don’t know any aspirational rural ladies, whereas London seems full of with-it game old birds. Plus my kids who love drama art museums blah and hate sport would kill me.
Also, I don’t drive.
Esther, I have lived in the countryside.* THE FENS, not a bucolic landscape of rolling hills and roses and wells and tiny glades, but the fens. A vast open wasteland of what is undeniably The Countryside, but the countryside of MORDOR.
I love the fens. But when Londoners move there, they do not cope. They expected the long evenings, and the beautiful views, and shooting parties, and the village fete. They are treated with suspicion, and always known as being from that London. They are resented for not having a fucking clue what they're doing with their acre plot of vegetable garden. They do not understand the CENTURIES OLD village politics. They do not understand why, on the map, the sea is four miles away and yet the sea is somehow RIGHT THERE. There are no buses, no taxis, and an eight mile walk to the nearest train station, which will get you back to London in two hours or so. And the schools are crap, even the private one. Singular.
My husband comes from RUTLAND, the absolute IDYLL of minted countryside. Actual aristocrats, village butchers, Michelin starred village pub. The politics remain, but with a genteel coating of passive aggressive-ness, and the village truly comes together to be NIMBYs when the threat of a windfarm approaches. There is a bus service, and taxis. The train to London is about 90 minutes. There's roughly one private school per square mile. Property prices everywhere make a woman wince, but Rutland is particularly winceworthy.
So my advice is choose your rural retreat with care.
*I now live in an urban suburb of Peterborough, and I love it even if there is occasional knife crime and everything is redolent of weed.