I’d love to love cities, I truly would. Apart from 10 glorious years in the deepest, darkest countryside, on top of a mountain, in the middle of a forest, I’ve spent all my life in them, or the sprawl around them. They’re where the work is, where my friends and family are.
Loving cities would make me happier and more at peace with myself. But God, it’s hard. I lie in bed and, like a fat, male, middle-aged Lady Chatterley, dream of a good stiff tramp in the woods. I watch the sun set over south London and wish I was in that woodland glade, listening to the deer bark in the distance.
What’s so awful about cities? How long have you got?
1 Let’s start with the bleeding obvious: they’re dirty and smelly. Forget the dogshit that means you can’t put a foot down without checking the pavement; I’m talking about the air. London, my home town, loses up to 9,000 inhabitants to air pollution every year. When it doesn’t kill you, smog sucks the pleasure out of life. Only when I left the city, in my early 40s, did I realise I actually had a sense of smell. When I moved to the Vosges, famous in France for the pure air and pine-scented forests, I was shocked to discover I could smell the wind, the grass, the trees. I even became a reasonable cook, now I could properly taste what I was working with.
2 There are too many people. I don’t hate humans, but I’m not afraid of solitude and want to choose who I see and talk to. In the city everyone is in your face, all the time, usually wanting something, from your money to your seat on the tube. You know what rats do once their cages get overcrowded? They start eating each other.
3 Even one person can be too many. An empty street is unsettling in a way that a deserted lane never is. At any minute, a stranger could leap out and beg you to make regular monthly payments to a guinea pig charity. There are no chuggers in the countryside. Axe murderers, yes, but nowhere’s perfect.
4 There’s nothing to look at. The country has lakes, mountains, trees, wildlife, star-spangled night skies, stirring sunrises and glorious sunsets. The city? Tarmac, buildings, billboards, other people (see point two) and dogshit (see point one). Parks? They’re just wannabe fields. Canals? Constipated rivers. And when night falls, house lights, headlamps and floodlights mean you can’t even see the stars. My wife, who detests everything rural, yawns and starts checking her phone whenever I get the opportunity to educate her about the constellations. But she’s a philistine. There’s a majesty to the heavens that can only be appreciated far from streetlights. And she might as well put that phone away. You don’t get 3G coverage where we’re going.
5 It’s so hard to get around the city. Public transport is expensive, unreliable and rarely deposits you precisely where you want to be. Cycling turns you into a self-righteous prig. Every walk is an obstacle course, thanks to cars blocking the pavement, cyclists who refuse to stop at junctions and town planners who see pedestrians as unwelcome impediments to their dream of turning the world into a fume-filled Formula One track. Driving is slow and expensive, and parking is banned or unaffordable anywhere you actually want to do it. In the countryside… well, you will need a car, given how rubbish most rural bus and train services are, but once you’ve got one, you’re golden. Speed limits are reasonable and poorly enforced, and you can park pretty much anywhere, so long as the muck-spreaders can get by. Even the most territorial farmer won’t grumble if you stick your Twingo on his grass verge.
And you’ll still walk at every opportunity, because it’s so much fun.
6 The total absence of weather. Out in the wilds, the elements hit you full-on; first you learn to survive the weather, then you start to enjoy it. In a big city, you can spend days without knowing if it’s raining or shining, so sheltered are you on your trip from home to bus to tube to work and back again. Show me a man without a Gore-Tex jacket in his bag and I’ll show you a pasty-faced townie, afraid of the slightest spattering of rain when he should be glorying in its dance on his face.
7 Urban living makes you lazy. Since you’ve got the buses and tubes, you tell yourself you might as well use them, even when you could easily do the journey on foot. Have you ever tried to get on a bus when the schoolkids are heading home? You’ll never see so many unhealthy-looking blobs, all hogging the seats for just three or four stops.
8 And they’ll be stuffing their faces with crisps, chips and chocolate when they could be foraging for wild strawberries, hazelnuts or even mushrooms and snails. Away from the city, friendly locals – everyone’s friendly in the countryside, as well as handsome and intelligent – will give you venison that they’ve shot themselves. My home in the Vosges wasn’t a fancy place, but it had a trout pond, dug out by a neighbour who never even billed me for his time or the use of his bulldozer. And a veg patch, full of beans and peas, salad and onions, shallots and garlic, sweetcorn and potatoes, kohlrabi and jerusalem artichokes, courgettes and cabbages, pumpkins, radishes, chard, chives, rosemary, parsley and thyme. Of course you can grow fruit and veg in town, if you have a big enough garden or access to an allotment, but you’ll spend a lot of time clearing up after cats. They love freshly turned earth.
9 Speaking of which, have you ever needed to take an unscheduled dump in the city? Free loos are few and far between, while in the countryside the world’s your toilet. All you need is a branch to hold on to and a few large leaves to clear up with, though old hands never to take a hike without a pocket full of loo paper. When my septic tank broke down, I dug a hole a short walk from the house and spent a week making like a bear in the woods. Try doing that if you live near Epping Forest or the Bois de Boulogne. Or rather, don’t.
10 The sporting facilities are better in the countryside. My local running track was a forest-fringed plateau, with hundreds of kilometres of empty roads and shady paths. My swimming pool was a mountain lake – free to use, so long that a single length would take you almost an hour, and with water as clear as anything that ever came out of a tap. At one end was a cafe serving sausages and wheat beer. Just imagine that, you poor, gym-subscription-paying, chlorine-stinking residents of the city. It’s time to buck the trend and move out.
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