Moving to the Country

I've always considered the countryside - and nature in general - as something to be admired from afar, in pictures or on telly or for a few days holiday in comfortable surroundings (never a tent, I don't get the concept of 'holidaying' by recreating in tiny form the conditions of a Calais migrant camp).  I admire its beauty, its peace and tranquillity and its spaciousness; especially the latter, which to a misanthropic bastard like me, holds much attraction.  But as someone who has only ever lived in London or large satellite towns, where nature exists in mere bitesize chunks, I had viewed the countryside as something intrinsically DIRTY.  Up close it's all mud and insects and bloody stinging nettles.

But 3 weeks ago, we moved house and now we live in a village (a small one at that, a hamlet to be more accurate perhaps, as it has no shops and just one pub and a village hall serving what I guess is less than 50 households.)  We might only be a 5 minute walk to the edge of the city of St Albans and 10 from the nearest shop - and my wife, who grew up in a slightly more remote area of the countryside scoffs at me for even describing this as 'the country' - but we are surrounded by fields and therefore we ARE in the countryside and can now self-identify as proper yokel country folk.  (By the current rules of self-identification, we could have claimed this living in a city, but without the credibility, obviously.)

The inevitable paranoia of a town-dwelling nature-phobe struck me on the day we walked through the door of our new home.  There were spiders everywhere.  I thought, fuck, it's the countryside, we have to share our house with a million spiders.  I'd been used to houses where almost every crack was sealed up and spiders were a rare intrusion; and here we were in a house (part of which is an 1850s built cottage) which appeared practically open to nature.  What else would we find living here?  Small, round, hard, black bits all over the place led me to panic that it was also infested by mice.  My wife insisted - as I rolled up and squished some of this evidence between finger and thumb - that this was not mouse poo, but it looked and felt like it and short of tasting it, I was not to be convinced otherwise.

Having reached this stage of unexpected anxiety at what should be a magic moment of walking into a new house, I was open to further panicked doom-mongering.  The wallpaper was bumpy in places and I feared damp underneath.  There were cracks in the plaster under this; and you'd get a sense of sloping floors as you walked from room to room - like the villains' hide-outs in the 60s Batman series - and I thought the house was sinking into some undiscovered Medieval cess pit and only months from fully collapsing.

The departing family, despite having nicely modernised the house and made it very presentable for viewings when selling, appear to have had adapted to country life by becoming slightly DIRTY themselves.  I assumed that they came to accept spiders as part of the deal and thus left them hanging immobile around the ceiling edges of the lounge.  One of my first actions - and most of you won't approve - was to run the hoover attachment along those edges to suck up every cobweb and every unsuspecting spider.  (I did empty the hoover straight afterwards, so hopefully they survived the experience and escaped from our outside bin).  Over a few days, noticing that spiders did not return in the same vast quantities, I was put at ease and even managed to tolerate them. (Was I becoming DIRTY thanks to nature?)  The fact that we now only have a couple, they are very spindly and small and they don't move, means that I tend to leave them alone.  (Any that DO move, however, especially if bigger or fatter, are electrocuted with a specially designed electrified tennis racket-shaped piece of anti-insect weaponry that, again, you will judge me poorly for resorting to.  In my defence, I only do it because I feel my life is in danger.  Ish.)

The previous owners' slight, nature-related DIRTYNESS also accounted for what I thought was mouse poo.  It was just bits of dirt, possibly mud.  It hasn't returned.  Somehow, we don't have mice.  Paranoia abated, thankfully.

And the wallpaper is only bumpy, because whoever put it up appears to have lacked one key skill required when wallpapering and that is the skill of 'not fucking up the wallpapering.'  I suspect the decorator was wearing boxing gloves or a blindfold or was drunk.  There is no damp problem.  Cracks were in the plaster not the brickwork.  We aren't crumbling into ruins.

So after that initial misguided and frankly quite stupid bout of pessimism, I find myself totally unable to moan about moving to the country.  The feeling is a strange one.  A sort of uneasy contentment, a realisation of being a bit of a lucky bastard and I am now void of ideas to write a cynical blog post about.

I will need to make sure I visit town regularly enough to remind myself of all the things I hate. otherwise I'll have less to write about.