reasons to move to the country (or not)

a cautionary fantasy

Photo by Pearse O'Halloran on Unsplash

I want to move to the middle of nowhere. I wish that I didn’t but I do.

I want to live in a creaky old farm house beside a river that burbles the news of the forest the way BBC radio burbles news of the wars.

I want spend my days walking and writing and cooking for boys and my evenings huddled beside an inefficient wood stove listening to the hiss of damp birch.

I want to throw up my hands once a week and holler, ‘I’m not a taxi service you know!’ Then grab my coat off the hook and stride out to the car shaking my head.

I want to wake up at dawn, just before Christmas, and admire the twinkling spangles on wavy old glass.

When I realise the frost is inside the windows not out, I want to think, ‘We’ll do something about that once I sell the next book.’

I want to lay awake being smothered by an old feather mattress plotting the violent death of the oblivious farmer who ruined my kitchen window view with his new cattle grange.

After ten sleepless nights, I want to set about seducing his wife Mary, first with a bunch of wild ramps and later a damson tart in the autumn which I will confusingly call ‘fall.’

Very slowly and carefully I want to convey to Mary the following: that although I am not from here and will never be from here the important thing is that I am not from London (though self-evidently I am).

Over two and a half years of fruit pies and wild garlic pesto, I want to persuade Mary to bring her husband round to idea that his state-of-the-art aluminium cow shed could easily be moved four feet to the south.

I want to have one perfect, sweaty summer fixing the old place up with my bare chapped hands, then five centuries of winters ruing the day.

I want to not bother hiring the local water witch then nearly go bankrupt digging a swimming pond in exactly the wrong place.

Later, the exhausting aftermath after the great flood of 2087 I want to find myself falling more deeply in love with the old place still.

I want four dogs: Two sensible mutt bitches from the same roadside litter called Shirley and Laverne, one stupid beautiful spaniel I am constantly threatening to take to the pound (but never do) and a miniature one who believes he’s a cat.

On the other hand, I want to spend six months building a chicken coop, acquire a flock of heirloom laying hens from a Instagram-famous chicken lady in Devon, then fob them off on Mary for free.

I want to be shocked but politely grit my teeth say nothing when she continues to charge me for £1.75 for a dozen fresh eggs.

I want to stick myself somewhere by choice and get stuck. I want it to be my own choice and I want to make my own peace with my ludicrous decision the way a 52-year-old woman makes peace with the dolphin her 18-year-old self tattooed on her arse.

There are other things I want, joyful things I can only imagine happening in the middle of nowhere, but I’m afraid if I write them down here then somehow they won’t.

I’m not sure I want to die in the middle of nowhere, or anywhere ever in fact. But if I had to die somewhere a field or a forest or a hayloft would be my first choice.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I do.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash