Town and country

I absolutely love living in a town.

Somebody said to me today that if we weren’t constantly shelling out every penny we had and pleading with the bank and going down the back of the sofa to pay the school fees we could have a nice house in the country like the real middle classes.

I am quite sure they are right. We could be having concerns more appropriate to the socially elevated, like arguing with the planning authorities about putting double glazing in a listed building, and worrying about gravelling the drive and stabling the ponies and the ash trees dying back. We could have an overdraught and a big house instead of an overdraught and a little one.

There was a time when I thought that all these worrying things would be really nice to have. True happiness and enriched living would be mine, I believed, if I had a roof made out of straw instead of tiles, or a front door made out of English oak by a fourteenth century herbert with an axe, instead of out of beech by some twenty-first century herbert with a bandsaw. True contentment, I believed, could be found only in a house where my bay windows overlooked a vista interrupted simply by sheep.

I can’t now imagine on what evidence I based that conclusion. What’s more, it astonishes me now how long it took me before I worked out that in fact this is not at all the case. It might seem very obvious to the rationally minded: but in fact these details impinged on my happiness not the smallest one way or another, except in that I felt a bit miserable and envious when I spotted that somebody else had them whilst I was still unfairly deprived.

Fortunately, age and self-knowledge have finally led me to a far happier conclusion. I only have to spend two minutes talking to friends – and there are quite a few of them – who are trying to convert their barn or who have to spend hours every week driving their children to Scouts and piano lessons and dancing classes and drama clubs to be profoundly, joyfully happy that I have no longer chosen to do the same. As far as I can see, what children want to do most is charge up and down the road with imaginary guns, play football on the Rec and be with lots of other horrible dirty finger-nailed oiks. Our doorbell is rung constantly all summer by small groups of other urchins wanting to know if Oliver is playing out. He almost always is.

My inner soul, I have discovered, is a completely vulgar urbanite. If I were to make a list of the features that really recommend a property to me, ‘proximity to the post office’ would be right at the top, and ‘Georgian facade’ wouldn’t even make it as a footnote. I like being so close to the Co-op that I can realise halfway through cooking that I have run out of something and pop round in my slippers to get it.

I can walk to the cinema. The ironmongers across the road sells absolutely everything. There is a French-style pavement cafe which is less than a minute’s walk away, and all my neighbours go there as well, so we can sit and gossip and drink wine and watch le monde wagging past.

I don’t really understand the appeal of the countryside any more. I have lived there lots of times, and consider myself something of an expert. I can fell trees and milk cows and spot woodworm in the beams and catch an escaping pig. But I have realised that I loathe wellies, and that actually it is not much fun to be surrounded by mud and beetles and people whose wits have not exactly been enlivened by their families’ habit of marrying their cousins for the last ten generations. I have lived in places where the monthly village dance is the highlight of the social whirl, and what I have mostly learned from that is that there is a jolly good reason why the rest of the world has moved on.

Admittedly sometimes I think it might be nice if only the garden were a bit bigger. But only a bit bigger. I love the challenge of trying to get lots and lots of things into a really tiny space, so there is something interesting to see everywhere you look. If I had a bigger garden I wouldn’t have time to do it all. I would have to choose between not bothering about half of it and pretending I was setting it aside for wildflowers and butterflies and trying hard not to notice that it had promptly colonised itself with brambles and stinging nettles: or getting a gardener, which would completely render the whole thing pointless. I think that would be a bit like a man marrying two wives and having to employ somebody else to do sex with them because he didn’t have time and just liked to sit with a glass of wine and admire them on summer evenings and show them off to his friends when they dropped round.

We won’t ever have a home called Something-Or-Other Manor, (or Hall, or Farm, or even Cottage). My natural habitat has turned out in the end to be halfway down a terrace, and our house name is the sensible and plainly explanatory Number Ten.

I think that is a perfect name. It is warm and friendly, and what’s more, it tells you everything you might ever need to know