Country Living Vs Countryfile

The other day I found myself flicking through the September copy of Country Living magazine. I quite like Country Living, as it has lovely photographs that I can happily look at for hours and pretend my house resembles the ones in the photos. These houses either look like a beach hut or a “Country Home”. The latter always makes me laugh, as it appears that the people who design them cannot afford carpets. There are stained floorboards, bleached floorboards and my personal favourite are the reclaimed floorboards. Reclaimed floorboards obviously come from a real country house, where the occupant has realised that they are bloody freezing and has ripped them all out to install underfloor heating. For half a year we lived in a house with beautiful stained floorboards. We moved into this mansion of a house in September and marvelled at the beautiful rustic floorboards until the first evening we spent there when a bit of a breeze picked up. Being perched precariously on the top of a Moor the wind swept up from the North Sea, into the vents on the side of the building, whistled between the floorboards and up the leg of my jeans as I sat on the sofa. We sat in the lounge for the remaining 6 months with our trousers tucked into our socks and enough rugs on the floor to obscure every millimetre of floorboard. The people who lived in the house before us must have worn salopettes while they were watching Eastenders.

Country Living also assumes that if you live in the country you will “celebrate the season by heading outdoors to gather a sun-ripened bounty of fruits and berries”. What the? All the damsons do is attract wasps who then proceed to eat themselves drunk and become cantankerous. The birds have already made a start with the plums and the windfalls that don’t get squashed into the lawn by children’s feet, get pulped by the mower. I have so many apples I don’t know what to do with them and I have 6 sloes, so not enough to make a mouse-sized bottle of sloe gin. Country Living also advises me to “Mark the harvest with a special lunch or party showcasing an array of fresh seasonal food and drink” and that I should “decorate the table with corn stooks and vases of late summer roses with hedgerow foliage, bright hips and berries”. I am not certain how the local farmer would feel if I had ventured into his wheat field, cut myself an armful and made some corn stooks to decorate my table, although I suspect a shotgun might be a prop in Act 1, scene 1. And I’m certainly not going to “turn hay bales into simple seating by covering them with robust material tied with twine” as I’d be picking hay out of my gravel drive for months. (Should the Editor of County Living ever get around to reading this, I’ll just point out that the bales in the photo to which I refer, were in fact straw and not hay.) I know that I may sound a little grumpy about this Country ideal, but that’s because as I read about how rush matting can soften a hard floor, I noticed something else:

There is nothing north of Warwickshire.

This confused me a bit as I know that where I live is definitely north of Nuneaton so I read the magazine again. I was determined to find something, anything to prove that the north does exist. And there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I couldn’t even burn the sodding magazine as it is too glossy, so I settled for throwing it with great force into the recycling bin.

Luckily, the same person who had passed on Country Living magazine had also supplied me with the last 6 months worth of Countryfile Magazine. Admittedly in our household we do refer to it as Tooniefile, but again it does have lovely photographs to look at when it’s too cold and wet to venture outside. I read about how to tell a wasp from a hover fly, viewed the top 10 Country Vehicles (One was a MGB Roadster, for fecksake) and read Adam Henson waxing lyrical about buying a good ram. I hadn’t even got as far as Matt Baker writing about his pedigree bantam chickens in the May copy when I found it; the results of the 2016 Best of Britain Awards.

It turns out that the Landmark of the Year is Bamburgh Castle and that my friends is most definitely not in Warwickshire, it’s right here in Northumberland. Turning to the next page the Heritage Site of the Year is Hadrian’s Wall and even John Craven commented that it was a “worthy winner”. Reassured that there is life north of Warwickshire I turned the page once more to find that the National Park of the year is Northumberland. How can a county boast such greatness and yet be invisible to the rest of the country? Yes I know that Northumberland’s Summer falls between the 12^th and the 29^th July. And yes I appreciate that there is a lot of rain in the winter and the wind from the North Sea (when its not blowing between the floorboards and up your trouser leg) would strip paint, but why on earth does the weather forecast stop at Weatherby and begin again at Edinburgh?

Some people know where Northumberland is. The older generation come here on holiday after the kids have gone back to school and they will have packed their suitcases into their Suzuki Swifts and be beating retreat back to Warwickshire in the next few weeks. The last bite at the cherry for our tourist trade is October half term, when the caravan and camping sites are full to breaking and you can’t get parked if you’ve run out of wine and need to nip to the Londis shop in the local village. After that, the campsites close, a lot of the restaurants close and the county begins to slip off to sleep in readiness for the madness that happens at Easter, when Northumberland suddenly bursts back into life.

So thank you Tooniefile Magazine for restoring my faith in the glorious place where I live. Unfortunately if you were on the shelf next to Country Living and I had to choose one of you to take home; I would choose the Warwickshire loving Country Living. Why? Because I don’t want to read about how to make a Bug Hotel or Ellie Harrison planting a woodland, I want to look at houses without carpets and bathrooms that resemble beach huts. I suppose that's escapism.