Forget the countryside: for peace of mind, escape to the city

Iknow that living in the country equals madness because my mother grew up on 80,000 acres of Australian Bush, where her best friend was a giant Merino ram called Billy Bunter with whom she’d play hide-and-seek behind the skinny eucalyptus trees. Unsurprisingly, as a Londoner born-and-bred, I grew up considering this a cautionary rural tale/tail.

Further proof, if it were needed, that countrydwellers have to make their own fun, doing whatever it is one gets up to in the absence of high-speed broadband and access to episodes of Love Island, is the news that a New Forest man (allegedly) “tormented his neighbours” by playing loud music by Queen every time their cockerel crowed.

Neil Dymott (retired) claimed that the sound of the bird devalued his house. Shouting “shut that cockerel up” while blasting Another

One Bites the Dust evolved into an alleged “campaign of harassment” against his neighbours (Helen Richardson and Paula Holland, a couple) that continued well after the death of the chook. Since this neighbourly dispute has now escalated to the Magistrate’s Court, it appears that Mr Dymott may have inadvertently devalued his own house. Either way, claims Miss Richardson, “he was behaving like a madman”.

It may seem counterintuitive but if you’re looking for a quiet life don’t retire to the country. Instead, move to Soho – where a) no one knows their neighbours (who probably speak a different language) and b) it’s quiet on Sundays and empty in August because everybody is in the country.

It’s one thing to enjoy bosky rural charms in smallish doses – ie at weekends, or the beginning and end of a working day – quite another putting up with all those angry birds, deafening combines, stinky fields and infuriating neighbours, 24/7.

Over in Cambridgeshire, meanwhile, having failed to secure planning permission to build a house on the two-acre smallholding she has owned for 17 years, Linda Watson delighted her neighbours by offering the site free to members of the Travelling community, with the proviso that they “must create sh*t for the village”. I’m assuming Ms Watson didn’t mean actual sh*t (though this could be a community by-product) and was thinking more along the lines of free-range kids-on-horseback, tyre- burning, bare-knuckle boxing and, with a bit of luck, illegal cock-fighting?

Come to think of it, since Ms Watson has had an anonymous offer of £350,000 on her land, perhaps chicken-hating Mr Dymott has snapped it up?

Look, don’t get me wrong — I LIKE the country. In contrast to the 40 years I lived in London, I love the fact that from my home in Hastings I can drive for just five minutes and be surrounded by the stuff. I like looking at it, smelling it, walking the dog in it… and then I like to get in the car and come home to civilisation, where I enjoy property shows such as

Escape to the Country and listening to The Archers. On the subject of which, every week since 1951, life in Ambridge, Borsetshire, has been driving its inhabitants increasingly angry/bonkers, to the point where they should rename the village Umbrage.

Fact is, deep down, some of us fear that, once in it, the only escape from the country (see also TV’S

Midsomer Murders) is via a box, after a dramatic – and not necessarily fictional – death.