I am 48 years old and I’ve got to the age when I think I know things. I’ve decided what sort of restaurants I like, what kind of people I like, what kind of music I like. I’m deeply proud of my just ‘knowing’.
‘Babe, shall we try that new poke place?’ Nope. I don’t like it. It’s just chopped stuff on cold rice, don’t get it, we’ll have Lebanese food instead.
‘Claud, shall we go with green eye shadow for tonight’s show?’ Have you got a temperature? Did you bang your head? The only colour I’ll accept is black, maybe navy on special occasions.
‘Mum, instead of a holiday by ourselves shall we go away with friends?’ Afraid not pumpkin, I have no interest in going away with you only to spend no time with you. I don’t like getting drunk with other grown-ups at lunch enough, you see. I like it when it’s just us family, a lot of chatting and Bird Bingo.
I am also extremely proud of my love of concrete. I have spent the last 48 years (give or take – for the first five I didn’t have a full-on opinion) believing that city life was the only life. I live on a bus lane, I like noise, I am in love with sushi and I always need to be near a 24-hour chemist. I like cinemas and bustle and traffic and hooting. I like odd smells that waft out of restaurant basements and I relish in the London underground.
Embarrassingly, I’ve always been even slightly emotional about it. The tube got me to school every day aged 7–18, it got me out of tricky situations (you never need to stay with a boy on the turn when the Northern Line is on offer) and now it whizzes my kids about to school, to friends’ houses. Plus it’s never, ever cold (this is key).
I like eating on a busy street – a bagel surrounded by fumes is joyful – I like pigeons and I really like that a selection of movie start times are on offer in various cinemas across the city. I like deciding to eat Thai food at 7:56pm and then eating it at 8:19. I like options. Look at all those little wine shops next to each other, let’s go to a different one every Friday. Good. That makes sense.
Like so many ‘solutions’ I’d come to, my adoration for city life was pretty clear cut, it was sewn up, it was done. I could never comprehend living in a village that had one pub, a lone bench and possibly a post box. Friends though, one by one, slowly moved to the countryside.
Once they’d made the decision to go, they’d sit me down, assuring me I should not take it personally (I did), and they’d talk about better schools, mention ‘oxygen’ (no, not sure) and announce that they’d apparently been dreaming of vegetable patches and space (what?). They’d declare their need for a dog and Sunday lunches and walks and fresh eggs. Yawn.
Of course, in return, I’d make (I thought) quite a strong case for cramped flats and pollution and hullabaloo. I’d tell them that dogs defecated (you simply can’t get away from it) and I’d reassure them that my local Tesco Metro did indeed sell eggs. And that yes, I was completely certain they were fresh. The conversation would always end with them patting me on the shoulder pityingly. They said I was a bit sad, a bit stuck and a bit mistaken. They said I was like the last person at the party who hasn’t noticed that everyone has already left. I was the woman in the kitchen shouting ‘one more shot’ to absolutely nobody as the last guests were already on their way out the front door.
I let them go (turns out you can’t actually kidnap friends) and looked forward to them calling, sobbing down the phone about creepy neighbours, the endless spiderwebs, the village green being a hotbed of gossip. I couldn’t wait to hear all about how they needed their hair done, their nails done, their eyebrows done and how they just couldn’t. I waited to see how they liked living looking like the Gruffalo. I was envisaging hilarious chats, where I would say, ‘Send me photos!’ And, ‘Ha ha. You’re feral!’
Every time my phone buzzed I’d think, ‘Here we go, they’re coming back. They’ve missed bars and taxis and Pret. How can they survive without Deliveroo? Babe, put the kettle on, this’ll be them now. I should probably start looking for a flat for them. There’s one available just on that busy intersection between the petrol station and the supermarket. It’ll be small, damp, overpriced and the lift is likely dodgy but they’ll be able to buy a Twix at 3am. Better.’
Here’s the thing – the calls never came. They didn’t cry, they didn’t hate the village green, some of them even entered vegetable and cake competitions and their kids put their phones away, removed their belly button piercings and took up knitting and books and tennis. I’d text, ‘You OK?’ and get a message back, simply saying ‘Great!’ with a photo of a sheep or a beautifully set table in the garden or a blue sky. They were enjoying the marrow planting too much to worry about nails and hair and spray tans. They’d, gulp, moved on.
I finally went to visit.
‘Come, you have to come! Just get in the car.’
‘I don’t have a car.’
‘You do have a car. I’ve seen it. Come! Wait till you see my tomatoes, wait till you meet the dog, wait till you see our garden, we’ve got a trampoline!’
Livid, I went to investigate. I wore completely inappropriate clothing to make a point (overly tight skinny jeans, pointy boots, absolutely nothing in racing green or, god forbid, brown) and went to see a friend who lives in an actual field. ‘Can you imagine?’ I said to my husband, as we arrived and parked next to a real-life ditch.
Now, wait just a second. Everyone hold your horses (well, when I say ‘everyone’ I mean me and yes, they have them there). The countryside is not what I thought it was. There were trees and stuff to pick from them. Don’t quiz me on what, if it’s not wrapped in cellophane and labelled I’m not completely sure what it is. We talked to chickens. We ate lunch that wasn’t just a whole sheep crammed in an Aga (that’s pretty much what I thought food was outside the M25) and we went for a walk. We weren’t walking to a place, you understand. We weren’t getting anything, we weren’t going to pick something up, we were just, well, having a walk. It was, drumroll please … absolutely outstanding.
The countryside is bloody fantastic. It’s green, there’s space, there are fields, there are animals just wandering about (we walked past three cows). My kids loved the trampoline (the only one they’d ever seen was in a concrete hangar in Acton) and we ate local cheese (what does that even mean?) and fed ducks in a genuine pond.
Don’t panic, I’m not leaving my beloved city streets, I’m still picking up sushi at 9pm and I will never be far from the Central Line. But, still, the whole experience was an excellent reminder and a great leveller because it showed me this: it is absolutely brilliant being wrong. There’s something fabulously freeing when you realise you don’t really know anything at all. Perhaps (and I mean definitely) I’m wrong about all kinds of stuff – those strongly held beliefs might just be puffs of smoke, a rigid, desperate hold on opinions that are nonsense. So yes, maybe let’s try that poke place, let’s consider going away with our mates and maybe I’ll even give green eye shadow a go. (Don’t worry, I’m kidding about the last one.)