Town Mouse to Country Mouse

I live in a rural area and I love it. The thought of living in the City makes me feel quite claustrophobic but at least if you run out of cigarettes or gin at 8pm on a Sunday night in the town, you don’t have to endure a trip of 15 miles to replenish the supply.

Many times over the years I have watched with bated breath as the City-dweller moves from the Big Smoke to the quaint little village in the hope of starting a new life and getting out of the rat race. These people have images in their mind of a beautiful thatched cottage peeping out from behind a veil of twisted wisteria. Behind this beautiful façade is a beautiful garden with a lawn mown in stripes and produce growing in neat lines in a weedless vegetable patch. The pond is covered in lily pads and the water is as clear as Evian, there is a beautiful wooden henhouse and the Black Rocks are laying an egg a day. The Town Mouse is even considering getting a pig to be fed on kitchen scraps and be killed and butchered to ensure their freezer is chock full of home reared pork to ensure that they survive the cold and snowy winter in the county. Now I’m not for one moment suggesting that this lifestyle transition cannot be done. I mean, Her Majesty the Queen does it with effortless ease. From wearing a frock on the Balcony of Buckingham Palace one day, to a head scarf, Barbour and a pair of wellies the next and she fits in a treat. Her Majesty however, has something that the majority of us don’t have and that is Staff. Personally I would kill to have Staff between the months of November and February as this is when the days are at their shortest and living in the countryside is damn hard when the days are short. Usually in the month of October when the mornings are crisp and the days are still bright, I suddenly develop a hankering for leek and potato soup and shepherd’s pie. For me, this signals the onset of winter and I look forward to cold days when I am snuggled next to the log burner, with Channel 4 racing on the television and we are warm and safe in the house while enormous snowflakes float down and land on the Velux windows. Now once winter has truly arrived and I have taken off my rose tinted spectacles, I remember that there is rarely snow of any merit. What there is of course is rain, more sodding rain that you would believe. And as for the garden, well, you just don’t go in it from November to February. I don’t care what Jobs for the Weekend Monty suggests on Gardener’s World, for those bitter cold and wet winter months I want to be beside the log burner watching the racing with a gin & tonic at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon. As such I would advise any Town Mouse to just forget about the beautiful garden, chuck down some bark chippings or just concrete the whole thing. This will be a help during the Summer months as when you return from your hour long commute (there are no jobs in the country) all you will want to do in your garden is sit in it with a gin & tonic. Actually, you won’t even be able to do that because as soon as the weather hints at it being Spring, the organic Farmer next door takes great delight in spreading hen shit all over his fields in the name of fertiliser. You will learn to recognise the signs – the hen poo is dumped in great big heaps in field gateways, the smell then goes away until they crack it open a few weeks later and begin to spread it. And my lord it stinks. It smells as though something has died and I have been known to do the school run with a scarf tied across my nose and mouth. My second tip to the Town Mouse is to assume that all Game Keepers are psychopaths. Approach him with a bottle of whisky, caution and do not be alarmed when he answers his front door with 4 terriers, 5 Labradors, a Spaniel and a shotgun. Cross him at your peril and always keep your dog on a lead. You may consider working from home to save the long commute and to enable you to spend more time trying to get your wisteria to survive the biting Northerly winds. This is a no-brainer, as the internet speed in the Country is so slow you can make a cup of tea, go back to your desk and the damn email still hasn’t sent. On the upside it makes your children incredibly patient as they are forced to endure constant buffering while attempting to watch anything on iPlayer. They will also become very tough children. My child has to be reminded to wear a coat and stays playing in the North Sea until I force her to come out as her lips are blue and she is shivering uncontrollably. If I’m wearing a tee shirt, jumper, fleece, coat, scarf, hat, jeans, 2 pairs of socks and a pair of thermal over trousers, my daughter is wearing a dress made by Disney and a pair of sandals. In short; there is a feeling of contentment available from the Countryside for those who choose to seek it and it’s not available in the local Londis shop. Oh and the pig at the bottom of the garden? You need a holding number to have one of them and I’m not going to even start trying to explain about pig movement forms.