Do you remember that Joni Mitchell song, when she’s moaning about people paving Paradise to put up a parking lot? By Paradise, I’m assuming she means the countryside. She probably is. It’s not just clever alliteration. It’s a social comment. A social comment about the need for more car-parks in the countryside.
I see her point, because I hate trying to park on mud and slopes and in awkward places ill-designed for cars. In fact, that whole bastard place outside of towns, that whole Nature area that fills the spaces between where we all live, that’s a bit of a fucking irritation sometimes, isn’t it?
The Bible started it, all this bias for Nature. The Garden of Eden is meant to be all beautiful and wonderful, but I bet if Adam and Eve had a proper house they’d’ve gone inside it for most of the day. I’ve got a garden and I only go in it every so often between April and August; to cut the lawn once a fortnight or to indiscriminately cut off all the growing bits that get in the way of where I might want to walk to fetch beers from the shed. The rest of the time I’m indoors, because it’s either cold and typically English-damp outside or it’s warm but full of insects and flying buzzing annoyances that land on you or come near your drink.
I live in South-East England. All the Nature areas here are just flat, charmless, green splodges of nothingness; spider-webbed by motorways and A-roads that sprawl uncontrollably from London’s fringes like an unkempt forest of 1970’s pubic growth sticking out of a pair of pants. There are few wondrous views that don’t involve a line of lorries and cars housing anguished commuters glued to their steering wheels by either hatred or apathy. Really, there’s no point visiting Nature where I’m from, that’s why I’ve never owned a pair of wellies.
Of course, wellies would be extraordinarily sensible and irritation-preventing if I went for walks out in Nature. Because, not having them means that when I do have to leave the domestic comfort of my house and surrounding concrete cosiness, I end up with mud all over my fucking nice footwear and jeans.
Not wanting to go and walk around in Nature makes you some kind of social leper. You’d face less intolerant disdain if you just told people that you were a paedophile. They go on about “getting some fresh air in your lungs,” but everywhere you go in Nature there are animals shitting on everything. If I stay at home, there’s only one room that constantly smells of shit; but out there, out in the uncivilised and wild spaces between our local A-roads, there’s shit everywhere.
And twats.
See, in the old days, the people who lived out there in Nature were harmless. Nature used to be for stinky people who married their siblings, shot rabbits and had never seen black people. Nowadays, rich bastards just drive their 4by4’s at 80mph through all the twisty turny narrow lanes; and if you happen to be poodling along at 40, not knowing where the fuck you are or whether the road straightens or bends again round the next blind bloody curve, or if in fact there’s some huge ditch or cliff or lump of dead animal carcass in the road, then some twat who knows the road inside out drives his Chelsea tractor up your arse with all the thrust and intrusion of George Michael in a Hampstead toilet.
I wonder if these bastards are just unconsciously irritated by the fact that they have a 5 mile drive to go to a shop that doesn’t deliver what they want. I wouldn’t fucking deliver anything to them. I’d love to own a Chinese takeaway in some village out in Nature and take phone calls from some bastard who wants you to find his converted barn in the pitch dark down some 3 inch wide track, which in the winter looks no more like a road than where someone’s pissed in the snow, just so I can say, “Fuck off and eat some mud or animal crap from all that Nature outside your house you bloody fleece-wearing middle-class hippy.”
And once all these Nature-loving town-haters have abandoned us soul-less rat-race heathens for their spacious squares of mud, they start soiling their corduroys in indignation when we build more houses on the bits of Nature on the edges of towns. Where else should we build houses? In the fucking sea?
But of course houses mean people and people mean crime and litter and noise. I fear crime much more out in Nature than I do in towns, because I can’t bloody see anything when I’m there. With no street lights anywhere, I fear crime and ghosts and monsters and crazed shot-gun wielding maniacs. As for litter, at least we have bins in towns. And as for noise, what’s noisier than your neighbour tearing up his 200 meter long un-made gravel drive at 50 mph in his fucking Range Rover? And that’s your next door neighbour half a mile away.
I guess it’s the huge defecation of concrete and metal on England’s formerly green and pleasant corner that has slowly turned us South-East-Englanders into such a breed of Nature-haters. We might pretend to LOVE Nature, because our educated, philosophical and cosmopolitan sensibilities decree that we SHOULD love it. But really, once we get out into it, we discover that it’s bloody inconvenient and irritating and packed with all the beauty and romance of dried shit hanging off a cow’s arse.
Therefore, I suspect that I have been townified to the point of utter bastardness. I do sometimes go for a countryside ramble (that’s the word they use for “aimless walk”, right?) but I have to overcome some deep-seated prejudices to get any enjoyment out of it.
At the end of the day, if there’s a dog poo on the pavement outside my house, at least I’ll be able to see it, so I say pave Paradise Joni, pave it!
