Town Mouse and Country Mouse

I was thinking this morning (a rarity in itself) about how some people love the city life whilst others prefer living in the countryside. I myself have always lived around the south-west suburbs of London, interrupted by a brief period of living in a slightly more rural location near Epsom Downs. Most of us live where we do purely because that’s where we were born and grew up, and more often than not our families still live locally and so there’s little reason to re-locate somewhere else.

The odd thing for me is that although I live a 20 minute train ride away from central London and have always lived within a few miles of my current home (with the exception of the aforementioned stint in Ashtead), I’ve never lived the ‘city life’ at all. If anything I’ve always lived the ‘suburban life’, very rarely venturing into the city for anything other than the occasional visit for work. The last few times I’ve been to London on social visits has been meeting up with some of the PS folk, but prior to that I think it was probably my 30^th birthday gathering which was over 2 years ago. The infrequency of pleasure jaunts to London is only really due to apathy; I quite like to wander around London looking at the sights and shopping and stuff, but it’s so often the case that living on the doorstep of somewhere or something means you never actually go there because you ‘can always do that next week’, but inevitably next week never comes. I certainly couldn’t live in central London – and that, my friends is the whole crux of the matter.

I really, really want to move away from London and out into the sticks where I can get a bit of peace and quiet. Where we live is actually fairly quiet; at least the road we live in is anyway. We live in a quiet leafy suburban street which fortunately isn’t used as a cut-through by anyone, and you can be out in the street or the back garden and only hear the birds in the trees and the faint noise of local traffic. But as soon as you drive out of our road and back onto the main drag, you immediately hit the usual noise and traffic associated with the outlying areas of a large city. It’s not that it’s a terrible area, though I wouldn’t exactly describe it as salubrious either, but you can immediately tell that you’re in the London suburb of Morden, Surrey, rather than the quiet village of Morden in Dorset, and this is especially so on the journey to work and back.

My daily commute is about 10 miles each way - not a huge distance, I’ll admit, and probably not as far as some of you have to drive each day, but the vast majority of it is the usual stop-start journey which should be expected from driving through Croydon during the rush hour. It normally takes me between 50-60 minutes in the morning and about 45 on the way home, though at the moment it’s only taking about 35 minutes to get in because of the school holidays. It could be a lot worse I suppose, but nevertheless I still get very stressed making the journey in the morning (though not really on the way home) with so many silly people fannying around on the roads – I really believe that most drivers in this country are half asleep when they’re behind the wheel, but anyway I’m veering off the subject slightly. I wouldn’t mind so much if I actually enjoyed my job once I get there but I don’t, and these two factors are key in making me want to move to rural Englandshire as soon as possible in order to get away from it all. I’ll admit that there’s a certain amount of rose-tintedness about the ideal of living in the country, with cricket on the green, roses round the door and Miss Marple sleuthing away in the village tea-shop, but I’m convinced that it’s got to be better than stressing out in the hustle and bustle of suburban London.

As I’ve already mentioned, we’re lucky that we currently live in a quiet little pocket which is semi-isolated from the world outside, and I do love our house and the road that it’s in, but as soon as you move out of the bubble it’s immediately hair-pulling time again. My other half and I have always had a long-term plan of eventually moving to a rural area, an idea which has grown in our minds after various visits to my mum who lives near Uttoxeter in Staffordshire. Recently Martin has begun to have doubts about moving to a truly isolated spot because he wouldn’t want to be totally cut off from ‘civilisation’. Aside from being slightly wary of the physical isolation itself, he doesn’t like the idea of not being able to pop down the road to Tesco if we’ve run out of something or other, or not being able to nip to B & Q if I’ve had one of my regular ‘Oh my God – I’ve run out of screws!’ tantrums whilst in the middle of some complex DIY project. I can appreciate the concern for things like this, but it doesn’t really bother me personally – you’d just have to make sure you keep a good surplus of everyday items and don’t leave it to the last minute to stock up.

I actually quite like the idea of being in a fairly isolated spot. I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest moving to the Highlands of Scotland (though I would love to spend some time there), but I could quite easily get used to living in the ‘proper’ countryside, i.e. somewhere which is still a fair distance from the nearest town or city. I long to get way from the noise and complexity of living on the outskirts of one of the largest and busiest cities in the world because it clouds my mind; I never seem to be able to relax – not really, truly relax. Even when we go on holiday I can’t seem to relax properly; I’m always fidgeting and I get bored very quickly. I suppose in a way it means that I almost need to live in busy surroundings just to be ‘normal’ – it doesn’t mean than I can relax but does mean that I never get an opportunity to do so.

Of course, if you’re someone who’s always lived in a town or city and thrive on it, it’s likely that you really wouldn’t be able to adjust very well to the country life, and obviously the same goes for the other way round; those who’ve lived in the country all their lives can find life in a city very daunting, but I can honestly say that I’d be so much happier living away from the stress and strain which currently clouds my life. There are obvious disadvantages with re-locating, e.g. being away from your friends and family, and the subsequent added difficulty of making new friends, but in my experience – and this goes back to my point about living close to something but not necessarily coming into contact with it on a regular basis – people tend to be visited by their friends and family more often once they’ve moved away, and especially if they’ve moved out into the sticks.

The ultimate compromise seems to be finding a rural area to live which is still within a reasonable distance of a sizeable town or city. Unfortunately this usually means that property prices in these areas are higher to reflect the ‘best of both worlds’ situation which they occupy, but I’m sure it’s worth it if you can afford it. The specific area we’ve been looking at recently is the northern section of the Peak District National Park, and in particular the High Peak, the area situated to the east of Manchester around Glossop and New Mills. It’s a stunningly beautiful part of the country – I know this for a fact because my mum lived there for a few years so I’ve visited the area many times – but it’s also within a very easy commuting distance of Manchester, as well as being reasonably close to Sheffield, Stoke-on-Trent and even Leeds. We’ll be in the area over the coming Bank Holiday (yet another visit to my dear old mum!) and no doubt we’ll be taking a trip out and about to look closely at the area and the kind of properties available, but we’ll also be taking a trip into Manchester itself, a city which I’ve never really been to but which I’m told is sufficiently smaller and more laid-back than London to make it a much nicer place to live.

I’m determined to be living in the country (or at least away from London) in the foreseeable future. I’m not sure how soon it’ll be, or exactly where we’ll end up, but I just cannot see myself living in London for the rest of my life – otherwise I think I’ll go quite round the bend.